Days Gone Remastered Review — Enjoyment Gone

Days Gone Remastered is hard to pin down. With mixed critical reception when it was originally released, it still ended up being in the top 20 best-selling games of its year. A remaster is, theoretically, a game at its peak. All the added content, performance improvements and ironed-out kinks since the original launch in a nice, neat package. With that in mind, I ponder as to why Days Gone was remastered at all. At best, this game is long-winded, derivative, and messy; at worst, it’s horribly written, uninteresting, and bloodthirsty. Better graphics and less glitches aren’t what needs to be addressed to make this game good.

Days Gone has you playing as hardened veteran and outlaw Bikie, Deacon St. John. Set 2 years after an outbreak of a virus that transforms the recently deceased into zombie-like “Freakers”, Deek and his best mate Boozer become “Drifters” and roam the roads of Oregon trying to survive as best as they can.

During the outbreak, Deacon and his wife, Sarah, are separated. With Sarah being sent to a survivor’s camp that eventually ends up being overrun, our denim jacket-clad wanderer must accept her death but ultimately holds out hope that she’s alive somewhere. For any zombie media consumers out there, it’s likely that Days Gone won’t surprise you very often. Most story beats and twists are part and parcel to this genre, never pushing past those tired old tropes. Something that’s unforgivable in a 35-40 campaign before any side content.

In a largely narrative-focused game, it’s such a shame that every character you meet is so unlikeable. While there is some representation in Days Gone, the harmful stereotypes that these characters exhibit feel deliberate. The Bi character, Rikki, tries to cheat on her spouse, Addison, with Deacon in an awkward moment that has no bearing on the plot. In fact, Rikki’s behaviour towards Addi is forcibly toxic and off-putting to watch during cutscenes.

Rife with casual misogyny, displays of toxic masculinity, and plain assholery, there are plenty of other characters to pick at, but I only have so much time. One of Days Gone’s gimmicks is that mission titles are always spoken during that mission. Worst case in point, there is a chapter in this game called “I Tried to Hit That Once”, and it’s exactly what you’re thinking, needless objectification of one of the only women in the story. I won’t even broach the infamously cringe ‘wedding scene’, you can look that one up yourself.

Deacon himself is played off as a “saviour”, yet the game establishes his willingness to capture people for a Slaver as well as his horrid emotional suppression that eventually comes out in unsettling grunts and sadistic cries when mowing down waves of people. As a fan of Deacon’s character actor, Sam Witwer, I was put off by his performance in these moments.  

To Bend Studio’s credit, one major character they seemed to get right is Boozer. This kind, older brother persona makes him endearing, and the rollercoaster of a journey he goes through is raw. Out of anyone, he shows the strongest, if not the only, character growth in the whole game, which, juxtaposed next to your own character’s journey, is quite jarring.

The world of Days Gone itself is improbably bloodthirsty. In a game about a zombie apocalypse, there’s a certain level of belief that players are asked to suspend. It’s likely that many people out in the wild are prone to suspicion when interacting with strangers, but when every single soul in Oregon outside of a Survivor’s Camp immediately starts blasting on sight, I find it just a touch too unbelievable. It’s a little too obvious when I graze the boundary of a farmstead and a mini army comes out rootin’, tootin’, and shootin’.

Unfortunately, while performance has certainly improved since Days Gone’s initial launch six years ago, with a frankly seamless experience performance-wise on the PlayStation 5, a remaster can’t change the questionable decisions made in the core game design. Examples include clunky and obtrusive UI, nonsensical mission structure, an over-reliance on tedious scavenging, and a penchant for completely blinding you when moving between dark and lit areas. Frustrating mechanics like fuel management, which not only limit your potential for exploration but also create a menial task that must be completed before every single run, lest you get stranded and have a six-minute-long walk back to safety.

The base game is competent, but derivative. Driving your bike through the biomes of Days Gone feels responsive, changing the way your bike handles in the different environments. The addition of the DualSense’s Haptic Triggers gives a nice weight to accelerating. Random encounters are a little repetitive and simple, but events like ambushes always took me by surprise and had me constantly vigilant while driving from that point on. Combat is solid, with a couple of well-placed headshots taking down most enemies in the game. The gun selection is also abundant, although many of them are locked behind camp progression, which can be quite a grind. 

Even when the game is at its best, it is marred by its poor pacing. During a reddit AMA in 2021, Deacon’s face and voice actor, Sam Witwer, blamed poor reviews on critics only playing “a few hours” before making a judgement. He mentions the horde mechanic being the centrepiece of the game, which, to his credit, is true! Fighting hordes is exhilarating, and the PS5’s hardware means that even with 500 freakers potentially on screen at once, the game still doesn’t skip a beat.

However, what Witwer fails to mention is that you’ll need to be a fair way into the game before you properly encounter one. After you discover your first Freaker-party, you’re still at least 10-15 hours before you’re strong enough to take them head on. It’s such a shame that the peak of Days Gone is kept behind 25 hours of awkward writing and derivative gameplay. Several more dangerous variants of Freaker aren’t introduced to you until the game feels close to finishing. A developer should not be asking their players to rely on faith alone for over an entire day to get to the “centrepiece of the game”. It’s likely that the majority of players won’t even make it to the point I’m talking about, if research is accurate.

If you are somehow unfazed by the writing and aren’t looking for anything revolutionary on the gameplay front, then Days Gone Remaster can at least provide you with a lot of content. Including the main campaign, you’re looking at at least 60+ hours of game, including side quests, Freaker nests, marauder outposts, post-game content, and more. The moment-to-moment gameplay remains competent, albeit repetitive, for that duration, with solid fundamental combat and traversal to carry you through.

Hordes, by design, are meant to be overwhelming. If you’re struggling with the game’s difficulty at any point, there are some handy accessibility options in the menus. Options that allow you to slow the game’s speed, cut out quick-time events (I enabled this one immediately), and some extensive customisation for high contrast gameplay and subtitles. Collectible audio cues are a little maddening, especially when they’re incessantly ringing during cutscenes, but are handy nonetheless. These are some nice additions that will allow the game to be more accessible from the jump.

In another smart move that makes the best of Days Gone more accessible, Bend Studios has taken the game’s “centrepiece” and expanded it to be its own mode, exclusive to the Remaster. Horde Assault is genuinely fun, letting you pick a location, a character, and a number of modifiers before throwing you against hordes of increasing size. I sunk quite a few hours into this game mode alone, and I’m most likely going to go back for more.

There are a slew of rewards to obtain, from extra maps and characters to Horde Assault modifiers and even a special cosmetic for story mode. Along with Horde Assault, Bend Studios has added both a Speedrun and a Permadeath mode for the main story, in case you need that extra challenge.