Zombie games! For the love of all that is decent and holy, how many of these can we have?
In my opinion, the zombie genre has been overdone to the point of nausea. Despite my feelings about the genre, however, it’s a really popular one. Days Gone is Sony Bend’s take on the genre and, despite my reservations about another zombie game, I have to admit that there are things about the gameplay demo Sony showed off that I found pretty cool.
The demo, teased at the opening of Sony’s E3 conference and shown at the end, is pretty bog standard. A survivor, a biker named Deacon St. John, travels through a post-apocalyptic world with the only goal of surviving. The early trailer shows his life before the outbreak and hints at the things that he will experience after the outbreak. It isn’t until the gameplay demo at the end of the conference that we see anything about what players will go through as Deacon.
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The gameplay demo has Deacon ride up to an encampment looking for a fellow biker name Two Dog. The encampment is looks deserted at first, but soon enough e comes across Two Dog fighting off a Gollum-looking zombie. After climbing up to a roof, Deacon surveys the area and finds it is overrun with the undead. After someone tackles him and breaks his leg on the landing, making all kinds of noise, the zombies become alerted. That is when the game got me interested.
The zombies in this game are not your regular shambling walkers. They move and act like the undead in World War Z. They race after their prey like a line of ants and use each other as a way to get around any obstacles thrown at them. Seeing them in action left a big impression on me. The thought of having to beat these hordes back actually worried me.
Past that, the gameplay demo gives no substantial information. There are glimpses of what life is like after the outbreak, with loyalties tested and difficult decisions to be made. All of that is standard fare for these kinds of games. Without more information, all I get out of Days Gone is that it’s an open-world zombie survival game. There is no release date announced for the game. It will be released exclusively for the PlayStation 4 when it does.
