Days Gone Review: 8 Ups & 5 Downs

2. Weird Presentation Issues Undermine The Story

Days Gone's graphics are impressive, as are its directed cutscenes, but the presentation is undermined at every step by bizarre technical issues. Load screens are a major problem, intrusive in a way that breaks the flow of the storytelling and even occasionally ruins some emotional moments. Cutscenes often don't transition naturally, and the jump to a different sequence might be linked by ten seconds worth of black screen.

Likewise, fade-ins pop up all the time in both gameplay and the directed scenes, which again only serve to break the immersion and pull you out of the story. In the grand scheme of things, they're hardly game-breakers, and certainly nothing to get too worked up about, but when they're combined they undeniably take away from the presentation overall, and ultimately result in it appearing more spotty, and more unpolished, than it actually is.

Fortunately, a lot of the larger technical issues have been sorted with post-release patches (such as the regular hard-crashes I experienced at launch), but some issues do persist, for instance a strange drop in the frame-rate when speeding with the bike at its top speed (but only with HDR switched on, weirdly), and the constant texture pop-in which, again, means the presentation doesn't live up to its full potential.