Days Gone is like if Assassin's Creed: Origins and The Last Of Us had a baby but without the good controls and if all the text was too tiny to read and important tutorial instructions on how to deal with impassable in-game barriers only appeared onscreen for about three seconds before disappearing forever, not even being stored in one of the menus somewhere, which are accessed in a stupid "swipe up/down/left/right one the touch pad for maps/inventory/story/skills" thing that I hate and quickly realised was also unnecessary.
This is what happens when games eat themselves - everything is swiped from somewhere else, but not as good as where it's been nicked from, which isn't so bad when you're talking about something like the shitty photo mode, but the controls - geez, did I miss a memo about all games abandoning the idea of just hitting a button once to do something so now instead you have to hold down the button and then wait and see if your character does the interaction animation? It was a minor irritation in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, but here it's really fucking annoying, and contributes to a sense of unresponsive controls. Another niggle is when you're near two different things which both use the same button to interact with: most commonly this will be a recently-killed enemy you can search for ammo or scrap and who was carrying a weapon that is almost certainly inferior to the one you're carrying, so instead of searching him for items you end up swapping one of your useful primary weapons for an inferior one - and this happens all the time in the game, would it have killed them to let you pick up weapons and items with different buttons? You use the X button for absolutely nothing as it is during combat. The "survival wheel" is also juuuust annoyingly imprecise enough to make selecting some things really annoying, and while you swap to some items permanently, other items you only swap to them for one use, particularly the rock you use to attract/distract enemies. Setting objects on the ground also seems to be impossible, so you have to throw things to stop carrying them, which is great in a game with stealth mechanics.
Also: the stealth mechanics are not very good.
I frustration-quit this after a few days, as all it did was remind me that I never finished the much-better Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
