Days Gone impressions Fun motorcycle times hampered by everything else Ars Technica

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Each of those Sony exclusives has some game-changing gem I can use to insist that they're worth investing in for dozens of hours—that sort of unmistakable highlight to finish the sentence "polished open-world adventure and," including massive-city web-slinging, polished storyrobo-dino safaris, respectively. The special sauce in , which arrives with the baggage of "yet another zombie game" as a loud descriptor, is a lot tougher to extract. It's there, but it's mild.

A Boozer, a usera loser

• You can easily get lost with 's scenery. A nice photo mode, similar to those in other Sony first-party games, lets you play with exposure, focusother tools to take whatever screens you want.
• Actual gameplay: the opening motorcycle-driving mission includes flora, faunaflames.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: in an alternate-reality version of the United States, a mysterious plague has begun turning people into flesh-eating monsters. Those who avoided the plague but missed a wave of evacuation helicopters were left behind to rebuild miniature societies and fend for themselves. sees you taking control of Deacon, a "one-percenter" in the forests of Oregon, with a motorcycle, a buddy, a missing wifea network of post-apocalyptic contacts. These people send Deacon out to do odd jobs (pick up supplies, reconnect electric generators, kill people) while he contends with unraveling truths and unavoidable tragedies.

For one, Boozer is quickly out of the picture. He rides ahead during your second mission to distract a crowd of zombi—er, pardon, "freakers"—so you can grab some supplieshe almost immediately succumbs to an ambush. His injured self is soon relegated to "voice in your headset" status, as are most of the allies you come across. Let's set aside the fact that the game never establishes what kind of satellite technology keeps Deacon connected with voice comms within dense, remote forests. The issue is that most of the plot is fed via in-game chatter, which is paused and interrupted whenever zombies start snarling nearby, or rival humans pop up, or Deacon approaches a question-mark indicator on his mini-map.

The best thing you get to do in is ride a motorcycle across a beautiful, dense forest and its abandoned, rustic towns. Had the game shipped with an "unlimited gas" mode, I'd recommend renting the game on that feature alone, much like I did for 's zen-like web-slinging system last year.

Bend Studio needed a while to get the game up to a solid 30fps refresh while rendering a variety of open plains, hilly trailsshadow-soaked forestsI'm glad to say they reached that threshold. Impeccable sound design sells some of the game's best-looking sequences as well, particularly when rain pours all around (thus helping Deacon sneak-walk past more zombies). But these accolades only apply to the PS4 Pro, as I didn't test the game on a standard PS4. Notes provided to pre-release testers warned that Bend is working on standard PS4 performance for the eventual day-one patch, so I can't confirm whether that version is yet up to a crisp 30fps refresh.

But in bad biking news,  frequently pesters you out of that bike-zen mode. The motorcycle runs out of gas very quickly, even after its first gas-tank upgradeit incurs physical damage whenever it bumps into anything, which you must stop and "repair" by spending the game's scrap currency while holding a "repair" button.

Deacon's bike-driving prowess is pretty decent, but certain primary routes teem with objects to bump intothe controls glitch out every so often—especially when you park the bike in a place that the game decides isn't ideal, thus making it bump into stuff in a glitchy-physics way and racking up damage in the process. That's by no means a game-breaking issue, but the bike-repair aspect weighs down the experience, as if the developers are always whispering into players' ears, "We're going to punish you when our game's bike controls work against you."

Your inventory includes three gun slots (pistol, rifle/shotgun, sniper/crossbow), traps, explosives"distraction" items (stones, noisemakers, etc.). You can run, sneakengage in third-person combat, but between a clumsy cover system and floaty, auto-aim shooting, the gunplay feels a lot like the ho-hum stuff of Grand Theft Auto. (I'll take this moment to clarify that the game bears some visual and tonal similarities to various Far Cry games, but the unsatisfying combat, more than anything, nukes that comparison point.)

In a few cases, you'll have to deal with giant fields of zombies, at which point your combination of gear comes into play. You'll sneak around, set up some remote-detonation explosivesmove to a hiding hole before setting off noises and distractions. Dozens of snarling zombies will mindlessly move into position, set off the kaboomsyou'll decimate a good number of monsters at once. Seeing so many zombies rendered on-screen with an emphasis on realism and terror (as opposed to Dead Rising-esque campiness) is palpably tensedispatching them with the big booms is exciting.

But that's a tiny portion of the experience. Most of the time, you're seeing one to  three zombies at once, which can be dispatched with the game's melee weapons (which fall apart after some use but can be easily replaced or repaired)it's always quieter and more efficient to melee small crowds to a quick death. Should you be ambushed by more zombies than that, you can easily run away, hop on your bike, drive a bit, waittry again. The game's zombies only make chase for so long before giving up, returning to their previous zoneresetting. In the case of human foes, meanwhile, they're coded to run to one of a few hiding positions in each "encampment" they occupy, so you can expect to sneak to each cover point, make a noisewait for humans to run like idiot lemmings to each pre-coded point for easy kill line-ups.

's monsters: there's seriously zero zombie variance to break up the combat. Bend Studio's idea of "gritty, realistic" zombies is to skimp on the Left 4 Dead archetype of monster variety. It's the same mindless creature, over and over, albeit sometimes in the form of a wolf or a bear, as opposed to having "super" zombies serve as chiefs or zone-controlling barf machines. (You'll find a screaming zombie a la L4D's "witch" character, at least, but not on a frequent basis.)  doesn't make up for this lack of enemy diversity with the zany, combat-shifting stuff of the Dead Rising series, which lets players craft and combine all matter of implement to take out screen-filling zombie mobs.

And, yes, crafting is also worth mentioning, if only because the game's "normal" difficulty means players never run out of supplies. This virtual Oregon has no shortage of elements needed to make your own bandages, molotov cocktailsmelee weapons. As a result, the game teaches you to take advantage of extra supplies and glitchy enemies to engage in straight-up combat—in ways that The Last Of Us so brilliantly taught its players not to do, for survival's sake.

My incomplete run-through of included just enough solid plot and tense battles to leave me with a somewhat positive experience. But the plot I treasured the most—particularly the stuff about Deacon and his partner—comes almost entirely through lengthy, non-interactive cut scenes, which all strike a serious tone while including jokes, levityheartwarming acting.

That seriousness was met with all too much jank in the real-time gameplay. In addition to bugs mentioned in the earlier sidebar, the game's open world either triggered enemies too randomly, forcing them onto my position with laser-sharp precision, or had them stare me down in open fields (humans and zombies alike) while doing nothing. The most telling moment came when I stealth-crawled through a town to avoid dozens of zombies, only to reach a final moment: a bear insta-spawned into the cityI had to pump burning explosives and bullets into it to live. In addition to the bear's jarring, random appearance, none of the nearby zombies reacted to this insane encounter.

That kind of busted-quest moment happened often enough to color most of my impressions. It's a great time to be a fan of open-world video gamesif you still haven't played the likes of , , or (in zombie terms) Dying Light, each of those imbue more plot, varietyopen-world possibilities into their lengthy adventures. Plus, if console exclusivity is a drag, all of those are available on Xbox One and Windows PC, in addition to PS4.

That being said, I went into with an open mind, having seen was pleasantly surprised to see that Bend fulfilled its goal of delivering a stunning, massive virtual Oregon. I got creeped out by solid sound design, saw satisfying flashes of gore upon pummeling zombies to death, took in a few moments of Sons of Anarchy-caliber dialoguepaused to enjoy sweeping views between my satisfying motorcycle drives.

Also, give credit where it's due: If were an Xbox exclusive, some might have praised Microsoft for finally turning its reputation around, having gone for so long without a good single-player adventure (its

If you're hungry for a new weekend-filling zombie adventure on PS4, is an easy rental recommendation. If you're already working your way through a big-game backlog, on the other hand, you should probably spend your days on other fare.

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