Days Gone promised so much. A post-apocalyptic world full of hundreds of zombies against a single protagonist, of the Sons of Anarchy kind, with an open-world and survival mechanics thrown in for good measure, but has it lived up to the torque?

The short answer here is no. In fact it applies the brakes on cohesion across the whole journey, instead, serving up a game pulling nothing but resting smashed biker face. And that's not a complement. Here's a snippet from our review:

Underneath the game’s contextual, narrative flawes, there’s something here. World-building, similarly to that of Horizon: Zero Dawn, is important and well-executed. The entire camp system and how Economy and Trust work within it, is important. Moreover, unlike Horizon: Zero Dawn, interiors are important and open in Days Gone. They add to the game’s “survival” dot-point, and that’s a good thing. NPCs aren’t always friendly, and the random ones you encounter who aren’t important to the narrative work to sell this world. There’s value here, but what’s problematic is that it’s also very, very fake.

This is Truman Show levels of “open-world”. It’s sandbox at best, and ‘open’ ‘space’, separated here deliberately, do not a videogame make. It’s also a grind. I played through on Hard, and on Hard enemies simply sponge more bullets (hilariously just standing there). You can stealth kill an enemy with one hit if you’re unseen, but frontal melee combat with the same weapon can take forever and the [animation] trees that accompany and combine with this system just reek of rinse-repeat.

Click here for our full Days Gone review.

About ten to twelve hours in and I'm not finding it 6.6 disappointing but I can't disagree with most of the review. It initially felt like a biker zombie apocalypse version of Horizon but that's fallen away as I played on. Now to me it feels like the protracted development means it's lagging behind "modern" games in a number of areas, and the last five years of development were spent making it look gorgeous.