Days Gone
It was aggressively mediocre. It was aggressive in how it swallowed up all my attention for several days, and mediocre in that despite it it wasn't all that good. I only got it because people were celebrating it like the second coming of Jesus Christ in the Steam reviews.
The good aspect of it is the plot. The bad aspect of it is the way the plot goes nowhere. You've got a story that is, essentially, what if Walking Dead met World War Z (which I fucking hate for stealing Max Brooks' title to shill a movie that has nothing to do with the book at all). It's The Walking Dead with zombies capable of running. Your main character is an outlaw biker (who feels a little too "clean" to be believable) living with his friend after being separated with his wife when the shit went down. Along the way (story is initially kicked off by friend getting badly injured) you get put on a journey to discover what happened to her, eventually find her and have to spring her from the police state prison the local Poobah has built.
I compare it to The Walking Dead for multiple reasons. Firstly, it's what the devs themselves said. Secondly, it may as well be an actually good version of The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct: you're some cracker (except a Pacific Northwest version of one) with a crossbow roaming the countryside. Thirdly, it nails the kind of feeling that TWD has of being (and I mean this sincerely, it's one of the things I love about Prey) so blandly realistic that it loops around to feeling completely engrossing. It turns out the entire map is drawn from real obscure places in a small chunk of Oregon (trans-Cascades), characters have backgrounds like "fought in Afghanistan," people get blood poisoning, it's that kind of story. It insists on itself, takes itself seriously, and yet never tries to be poignant or make some gay moral point and so is a lot better for it.
As for the zombies, they're not as interesting as The Last of Us, but these are basically real living people that (unrealistically) are somehow able to survive rooting around in the grass for roots and taking down deer with their bare hands. They've got ass rabies that makes them act like hive creatures. Occasionally you get the freaks that are special (big nigga, fast nigga, etc) but 99% of the time you're just dealing with fast people that don't tire. Spoiler alert it was made in a lab (you fucking knew that already, it's ALWAYS made in a lab).
The problem is that it just shits the bed at the end. At first your big conflict is this mystery about what FEMA is up to (same villainy as IRL, being fucking useless while sticking their noses into everything) and dealing with this cult of Mad Max wannabes that worship the zombies. They're boring and I hated them, which is a problem because they're a huge chunk of the game. Then you move on to this big plot arc about joining the local militia, who are actually extremely competent, but go batshit crazy (Colonel is charismatic as fuck before his God stuff gets out of hand, I'd lay my life down for him right away) and have to be couped. The problem is that it's like they realized they'd clocked in 50 hours of content (which is all the same, this is not a good game from a standpoint of gameplay variety, it is ALWAYS the same) and just rushed to finish it up. So you get this big showdown where everyone sings kumbaya and teams up to fight the enemy, except in actual gameplay it's just you running up a hill shooting bulletsponge enemies. Your bro sacrifices himself but oh wait he actually lived, and then it all ends with a big wet fart and it makes you play some lazy epilogue cutscenes (as missions, have to go hunt them down) to tie up the plot threads it couldn't be bothered to finish before the fucking ending. It just shits the bed, and then lays in it.
The gameplay suffers from balancing issues. Now, you could argue it's my fault for not playing the right way, but the thing is, I didn't FEEL like I was cheesing, I felt like I was doing the obvious and CORRECT thing to do, I just wasn't actively gimping myself. The central gimmicks of this game are having a motorcycle, which is like having a car, except it's a motorcycle. And hordes. These zombies are fast, they don't tire (meaning they WILL catch you eventually as YOU tire), and they come in incredible numbers. The game really impresses how a huge number of people can fill a small space and still be a HUGE NUMBER OF PEOPLE, because you'll be dealing with 100, 300, 500 of them and it's a nightmare... early on.
So early on you get chased around and your guy will run out of juice really fast. You simply cannot shoot these things down standing and fighting: you pretty much have to turn, pop some, turn back. You expect to stay just outside of their grasp except for when you can use some sort of natural chasebreaker, some piece of terrain, that will slow them a bit. Early on you have a shit-ass motorcycle and shit-ass guns and regularly run out of ammo. But the game throws these stamina upgrades at you and you eventually reach a point where you can basically just outrun them all the time, and you'll eventually get a gun (for me, the M14) that can plug these things efficiently enough that you're no longer in genuine danger.
Despite that, it still manages to be engaging in the same way (genuinely meaning this) that cleaning up an apartment or doing your lawn can. You still have the feeling of hunting and wearing down these things, watching a massive swarm of hundreds of monsters slowly whittled away by your constant, consistent rifle fire. For me, I tended to (before getting the really OP submachine gun) kite them at long range with my rifle. But this is apparently not how it was intended to be played; it was intended to be played with you running around city streets, ducking around buildings, shooting them point blank with pistols, almost always getting overrun. In other words: played poorly, like a fucking moron.
I do absolutely hate that it doesn't start marking the horde locations until near the very end. It introduces the horde hunting at the very end, by which point I had literally killed half of them, including the largest free-roaming one in the game, by myself, with a semi-automatic battle rifle. Bad case of plot not keeping up with what the player's actually doing. The way hordes work is that they mostly lay around inside all day (but not always?) and roam at night with a dedicated cave for daytime snooze and watering and "feeding" (feeding on what? it's been two years) grounds. So if you really want to play detective, and I have done it, you can approach it like a real hunting game and try to find the horde based on the routes and the places you've exposed. Personally, I just think it should have marked the grounds as you find them, maybe have an option to track (hero is an uber-badass tracker/bounty hunter for reasons that are never, ever explained) them back to their cave so you can see the exact route.
The last time something like this happened to me was Sniper Elite 4, where I thought, naively, that I was supposed to actually use the stealth system and pick off enemies one by one and be a ghost (and it sucked ass, and it wasn't until near the end that I realized the game got a lot better if I played it like COD).
It also has bike chases that come up just often enough to be aggravating. I think they intended for certain mechanics to be more prominent than they were. You can stalk and hunt deer, but meat is just about useless in the game, exists to be sold but not worth the effort compared to popping zombies. There's crafting recipes for plants, and I did stop to harvest those, but it rolls them out so slowly that it's a joke; only the initial Stamina booster mattered (because I really needed those). There's these lone motorcyclists that your guy panics about, but only on very rare occasions did I see an actual pack of them. I think they missed an opportunity to pull a Road Redemption and combine melee with motorcycles, or improve the accuracy and have taking zombies on a motorcycle chase be viable (come to think of it, I probably should have used my motorcycles more for repositioning early on to regain stamina, but I also specifically avoided leading zombies into the motorcycle because they can knock it over, in which case you're just fucked, you won't get it set up and get on it in time). Ambushes at least were well done: sniper shoots you off your bike, wire knocks you off it, bike goes flying, enemies are on you RIGHT AWAY, it's not telegraphed from a million miles away like RDR2 (even if the bits aren't unique like in RDR2).
What else is there to sperg about. The game is fairly based in terms of diversity, until late in the game, and even then you can justify it as the southern parts of the map explicitly having lots of outsiders from California. The locals are White. Sometimes not, but you basically are fighting White people, most of your allies and camp members are White people. It does seem allergic to having White doctors. Oh no, you'll have a fat Black lesbo doctor that's banging this Indian-American (but White-looking, high caste) outlaw biker (???? she's honestly a good character) bisexual, there's a Mexican doctor (I assumed he was Cuban at first), there's a Black good guy militia leader, a Black doctor, basically if they're Black they're a fucking genius in this plot. But the thing is, I was able to get quite far in the game before race stood out to me at all, which is completely unlike something like Far Cry 5 (one of the games this is tempting to compare to). Even where it shows up, doctors aside, it feels very natural and if it's not natural (like a Japanese tourist) it's commented on.
The map is okay. The first region is absolutely beautiful. I love forested mountains. THICKLY forested mountain. It's rare if ever you see a game that actually has forests thick enough that you can't just walk through them (Kingdom Come: Deliverance does this), but here the "Cascades" do have the haunting feeling of land that swoops up all around you, every path is a ridgeline or a holler, huge trees that tower overhead, foliage everywhere around you, constant fog and rain. Then there is also this snowy mountain area that is woefully underused. Should have had a dedicated region for it. Most of the time you're in more generic stuff. Belknap is 'high desert," meaning ugly as shit sagebrush Western. Lost Lake is a generic Mountain West forest-countryside type deal, has snowy areas. Crater Lake is basically just there to serve the plot of having a base on Wizard Island (fucking awesome, it's like a postapocalyptic Tenochtitlan, I love it). Iron Butte is rather pleasant, like a warmer Lost Lake, but is used very little. Highway 97 feels like what I picture California as, almost more like a w
In summary, 4/10
Ready to buy a motorcycle IRL and road trip to Oregon