Play One such event saw me taking out half the horde from a balcony with molotovs and grenades before leaping down into the remaining fray and scrambling to find resources to build more, all while they nipped at my heels. This involves a several-mission-thread of sneaking into NERO-occupied areas and eavesdropping on them from behind obstacles or within long grass as they explain world lore, which is not particularly interesting and annoyingly repetitive if you fail (and I did, by rushing through in sheer exasperation at having to do the same mission-type over and over.) To unlock much of its central mystery, Deacon must snoop on the comings and goings of the National Emergency Response Organization, aka NERO, as they research the freaker outbreak. Even so, I found compulsory stealth-only story missions the least welcome variety in Days Gone. As long as they’re not facing you, they’ll rarely become aware of your presence. Though you can’t hide bodies in Days Gone, enemies are spread out enough that you can stealth kill one and often leave a body in broad daylight without it being noticed. While long grass and plenty of cover help, run-ins with human enemies are made easier by the fact that enemy AI is rarely clustered together. Zom-byeStill, human marauders and feral Freaker-wannabees, called Rippers, who occupy camps (aka outposts), are fun to rumble with, even if they present a somewhat easy challenge because of a very forgiving style of stealth gameplay. One, who is introduced in the later stages, feels particularly redundant, and is there purely to cause conflict rather than exist as a fully realized character in his own right. The human antagonists, on the other hand, are as interesting as cardboard cutouts: they’re virtually all roughly sketched bad guys who are bad for bad’s sake. His gruff charm and unassuming ‘I ain’t no leader’ demeanor is mostly well voiced by Sam Witwer (AKA Darth Maul on Star Wars: The Clone Wars), aside from moments where he inexplicably yells during stealth missions and an occasional tendency to over-act in more frantic sequences. John is an endearingly gentle and sweet-natured protagonist. When you slow down for a minute or two, these issues combine with a dreary, uninteresting open world and add up to an uneven and mostly toothless zombie experience.For a gruff biker dude traveling through a zombie-infested (okay, they’re technically virus-infected humans called Freakers, but functionally the same thing) Oregon, Deacon St. Yet through its 60-odd-hour ride, Days Gone loses its focus with repetitive missions, a meandering and thematically unsatisfying storyline, and an excess of bugs and busywork. Sometimes, there are spectacular hordes of them. Days Gone kicks off relatively simply: you play as a biker riding through an open-world zombie post-apocalypse, seeking answers around his dead wife and smashing enemy faces in with crunchy, weighty melee weapons.

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