My opinion on Days Gone has turned around.
Firstly, it manages to sit in this comfortable middle ground of competence where it doesn't really feel praiseworthy in any way but it is constantly engaging.
Now, the game is a slow burn. Reviews compared it to a Western, but I think it's way too slow for its own good. But there's a few things I'll address.
Gameplay wise, i compared it to RDR2 and Far Cry, but I somehow missed The Last of Us and a more specific comparison to Far Cry 5. Sharing a Mountain West (but actually authentic/thoughtful) setting with Far Cry 5 it can't help but feel like that, and it wants to be The Last of Us in being a slow, clunky/weighty game (movement wise) with a feeling of seriousness/reality about its setting. Unlike The Last of Us the crafting is somewhat boring, the guns have no pow to them and the story feels to show any showmanship at all, but it manages to build on itself just through familiarity. It's a lot like The Walking Dead in that it manages to make its own setting feel so mundane and its characters so human - but still mundane - that it sells itself as a real place. The map helps with that. One thing that struck me is that, thus far, it feels like it actually depicts the real Pacific Northwest. I hadn't even noticed it UNTIL a character pointed it out, but there were no "people of color." Until a random Black lesbo doctor couple got thrown in. But it is true, there's some Latinos and Asians and stuff around, but the characters don't stick out, it is so natural and normal to American society that the kind of aggressive obnoxious propaganda I'm used to - like in Fag Cry 5 - isn't there at all. Characters act like how they should. Biker hero's biker partner calls him a pussy for picking flowers, for example.
As far as gameplay goes, the scavenging isn't meaningful and past a point ammo doesn't really matter in that you will just buy it from the huge amounts of cash (creatively bankrupt currency system; it's hard to imagine a fiat currency working among mutually hostile, tiny camps) you have. I haven't seen if meat has a use in and of itself yet; forage is used to make the powerups (again, like a Far Cry game almost exactly). But the big point of it all is the hordes. That actually wasn't what drew me to buy it - I thought those looked stupid and I just reflexively hated the World War Z Movie style of zombie - but it feels very, very different here, in the same way that Dying Light mixing parkour with zombies felt different.
You cannot outrun the zombies, they don't tire and they will gain on you. You don't even really have an advantage at climbing. They come in massive groups (dozens) and they have jerky motions and even slightly dodge (mostly by flicking their head) gunshots, particularly if you're doing follow up shots. You have no time to aim but will accomplish nothing without aiming. You do have the motorcycle, but it's a piece of shit (surely they aren't that slow in real life?) and the game won't let you aim shots from the motorcycle (which is bullshit, no reason it should force you to start it up every time you get on or get off). So pretty much every encounter is unpleasant.
At first this is more annoying than anything, but again, the hordes are the point, and it's hard to appreciate them without seeing it and even harder without actually playing yourself. They spill like liquid, a human wave. As you fight them it tends to draw in zombies from around you, complicating matters further. However much you try to overestimate it, you will still underestimate it. It's deceptive to look at a bunch and think you can handle it, but you can't.
The hordes have a unique kind of horror, too. It's not a scary game at all - you have to REALLY try to make zombies actually scary, they're like white noise - but when you put these in the context of "afraid of getting killed" - you know the feeling - it's very effective. Some of them seem to just wander around the landscape. Some are clearly tied to setpieces (which, unfortunately, tend to be blown as you'll die on the first encounter, meaning all the surprise is gone). There's a real early one, set up so you'll run into it one way or another, with a train on a railroad bridge and they spill out of the train, falling, onto the ground to pursue. But the one that got me was doing a minor quest and seeing this little (by horde standards) migratory horde pass in front of my motorcycle. I have no idea if it was scripted or if it just happened to coincide with it. I did not kill the horde - and I don't know if you have to kill the whole thing in one go or if it has a hidden kill count - but I was watching it through my binoculars, watching them all following one another. These are the "ripped mutant," I am Legend type of zombies, visually boring, lots of gasps and creaks instead of unearthly moans, but that was the closest I have seen in any game to the shambling mass of dead.
The way I dealt with it was to kind of approach it like an Indian. Ride to the top of bluffs, bombard it with firebombs and other ordnance, which if you aren't seen it won't even know to pursue you. Snipe at it and keep relocating with my motorcycle. You always, no matter what you do, want to park your motorcycle ready for a clean getaway, no backing up. In this manner I whittled it down greatly. Of course, eventually you unlock some gun that takes half the challenge out of it.
The map design is somewhat nice. I've been to three regions so far, and I'm not familiar enough with Oregon to really know what exactly to expect out of the others. The first area is far and away the best, so of course they barely use it. Very thick mountain forest, very rainy and foggy, gloomy overbearing atmosphere that's suited to a sort of camping/wilderness theme. Then you get dumped into this high desert crap I did not care for. Still forest, but more of an open chapparal type, scrubby trees, more town, sandy. Found it ugly. Now I'm in what feels like the loose open country (not farmland, but the trees are further apart) with a bigger town. I really like it when games deliver a great deal of visual variety while keeping the differences fairly SUBTLE (Mad Max was a master of this) and this is doing a good job of it.
I like the ambushes. They don't have the variety of RDR2, but they actually take advantage of the camera to spring enemies on you out of nowhere. You can get clotheslined off your bike, you can get sniped off your bike. (You can also wander into bear traps, which I keep doing). i don't know if there's a way to anticipate it and avoid it or if it's scripted, but compared to Mad Max snipers, these snipers actually feel very threatening: they shoot your bike out from under you, throwing you, denying your immediate means of transportation, springing an ambush of close up enemies and forcing you to deal with that (under sniper fire) and then eliminate the sniper.
I do not like gasoline. It is an obnoxious mechanic that adds nothing. When you go overboard on making the player refuel/eat/sleep/piss it has the opposite effect as intended on immersion. Balanced way way worse than Mad Max; the gas is both too plentiful and runs out too quickly.
