Recent reviews by Arthur

The drop in quality, polish, and in general enjoy-ability from the base game is immense, wouldn't recommend.

Games should be fun to play

Overlooked, underrated and underappreciated is what I'd describe this game as. The narrative is gripping at the beginning, slows down a bit then picks back up, lines can be cringe sometimes but the delivery by voice actors and actresses is top notch as well as the level of cinematography for the cut-scenes, game play was fun and different. the fuel system and the non unified money system was fresh, the crafting system makes resource scavenging actually fun. Riding the bike is also very fun from start to finish due to the handling model including stuff like traction and angling to make riding always fun. Gun play is good enough for a 3rd person shooter, not too much weapons customization but guns handle differently to make those weapons feel like you need to invest time to get good at. Human AI can be inconsistent but works well enough, but freaks are very well thought out in my opinion, fighting hordes needs a plan, and exit / fighting strategy which always makes taking on a horde very fun. The AI pathing for hordes are very intelligent and consistent always keeping pace with you. One thing I'd like to praise bend studios for is the graphics settings menu, it's actually mouse and keyboard navigable, tons of settings to change, a background with real time rendering to see the affects change in real time as well as a performance metrics for GPU and CPU time plus there's no need to restart to change any of the settings. good stuff right there.

Now onto some negative aspects.
Graphically the game is impressive, very impressive, but this can be inconsistent as sometimes assets won't load until up close, high quality textures doesn't load at all, parts of the map wouldn't even render and you fall though the map, LOD management can be inconsistent spawning enemies and assets right in front of you. The motion blur on PC has a longer shutter speed but the motion threshold is a bit too stark so when riding the bike the upper part of the screen is not blurred and the lower part of the screen is blurred but the transition is too stark resulting in a scene where the upper part of the screen looks like it doesn't have motion blur but the lower part of the screen looks like motion blur is on. depth of field could've been implemented more into the scripted scenes like when talking, skinning and rescuing. shadows doesn't cast from certain light sources, Lastly I don't think reflection quality should've been bundled into "Lighting" setting and soft shadows should've been more prevalent.

Days gone performance profile is good but not consistently good. Inside of the ark sees a lot of frame time stutters sometimes from 7-8 ms to 30-40 ms. areas like camps are very stuttery especially in Lost lake. When ridding the bike there seems to be an effect akin to frame time stuttering but it's actually the game speed slowing down, this happens very often and is very annoying, without a performance overlay you'd think that it's a stutter. But when the game runs well, it runs really well! on high end systems expect to play at high refresh rate and mid range to low end systems would at least hit 30fps with console level graphics settings. Even during intense horde moments frames wouldn't drop too much provide you have adequate Ram.

Conclusion? get it. just get.

Super fun! a bit short tho and not much that motivates replaying.

Glad I get to relive part of my childhood for 2.99$. It's works, it just works. Until it doesn't.

After 77 hours, here is my verdict. It has problems, lots of it but it's a damn good game that you have to experience.
Good story, side quests are okay, side activities are fun, exploring and roaming is rewarding both narrative wise and game-play wise. But, Combat could've been much better with the addition of a shorter dodge, parrying and blocking. Hit boxes are too strict and enemies move too awkwardly. Graphically HZD looks phenomenal when it works but only when it works, sadly 50% of the time it doesn't, flickering textures, a lot of aliasing, a lot of shimmering, volumetric light shafts has a lot of dither / break ups, floating and flickering foliage, black spots in the sky, disappearing shadows and some performance issues like random and reproducible stuttering. Cut-scenes are good most of the times but there are still some sub par voice acting and some very bad and awkward facial animations, but the cinematography in HZD is absolutely amazing. thankfully some of these issues have been worked on as you get into the Frozen wilds DLC. Cinematography is improved, cut-scenes are much better with much more natural voice acting, animations, motions and facial animations. graphically frozen wilds is an improvement as well with added particle lighting, dynamic tessellation etc. Overall I enjoy my time with HZD more often than not it has it's issues but there is so much more beneath all that, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

TLDR: Get it on sale. It's a very good game but it also have some major issues.

Game runs very poorly, from 110 to 40 back to 100 back to 35 fps, even at lowest settings these frametime inconsistency still occurs. A very unplayable, stuttery experience and the level of visual quality does not justify this level of performance, I've spent hours trying to fix this to no avail. The combat system feels like it's been abandoned after closed beta, I cannot progress past a certain quest due to poor quest design, very buggy, texture pop ins, NPCs walking around with no heads (in cut scenes as well sometimes), dialogue cut outs in cut scenes and game play, crashes, DLC doesn't install properly, few second freezes, and finally just a general waste of time.

System: i7-8700k, GTX 1080ti, 16gb 3600mhz. Same performance on an i9-9960X system with 32gb of 3600mhz ram.

Enjoyed most of the 45 hours it took me to complete the game and both dlcs. Great story telling, rich lore and good use of good characters, just a fascinating universe all-round, graphics are great(80% of the time at least), high quality pre rendered and real-time cut scenes, sound design is impeccable, player animation is topnotch. Now the bad. Performance is very inconsistent, voice acting is questionable, sometimes cheesy dialogue, graphics sometimes is inconsistent, animation other than player is only good in a few occasions, probably the worst hair-works implementation till this date, invisible walls in open world sections IE.Vladivostok, sometimes real time cut scenes just don't seem right and feels off. The gun play is bad but nothing new here, janky mechanics and movement feels a bit slow and very prone to unintentional bugs IE clipping, getting stuck etc. lastly the 2 DLC doesn't seem to be on the standard of the main game but they are at least fun, especially Two colonel's captivating story. All in all a very solid 7.5/10 game.

57 minutes of play time 7 total crashes. Now I can't even launch the thing. 10/10

Playing this game isn't a just cause, and my cause for recommending this game isn't just.