When I originally reviewed Days Gone on ye olde PS4, I described it as a ‘touch derivative’, yet ‘sprawling’ and ‘handsomely made’ with a ‘surprising amount of heart’. In 2025, it feels like the intervening years have not yielded the sort of advancements that one would expect in the open world, action adventure genre. Indeed, though I think that while the overall thrust of my original PS4 review remains largely correct, I also feel that by taking a retrospective look at the experience through the lens of Days Gone Remastered I’ve come to appreciate the numerous things that the Bend Studio developed offering did so well to stand out from other genre efforts.
Days Gone Remastered PS5 Review
There’s Still Plenty Left In The Tank
Clearly one of the marquee features of Days Gone is the horde, a many numbered host of scrabbling infected all eager to tear you to bits like a box of chicken tendies. At its peak an undulating torrent of ravenous infected, taking down a horde requires careful planning, the ability to think on the fly and a steady trigger finger. Not only is the horde now arguably more impressive than it was back in 2019 – Days Gone Remastered taps into the extra grunt afforded by the PS5 to make these even larger than before – but it feels like nobody else is really doing adversarial combat like this and on this sort of scale within open world game design.
Another aspect of Days Gone which has aged appreciably well is the traversal side of things. Rather than just proving to be an especially stylish and expedient way of getting from point A to point B, the trusty bike belonging to our grizzled protagonist Deacon St. John has greater gameplay ramifications than that. In addition to a spread of visual and performance upgrades that are intertwined into the progression structure of Days Gone Remastered, there are also other concerns too, such as making sure the bike doesn’t fall apart on you and you have sufficient fuel to get to where you need to. As such, this lends Days Gone Remastered a more thoughtful quality than you would get in other open world efforts.
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Though its post-apocalyptic tale of Sam Witwer’s hard-bitten biker tracking down his long lost love is entertaining enough, much like fellow PlayStation Studios post-apocalyptic offering The Last of Us, Days Gone depiction of a natural world that is regaining its dominion remains compelling. With Days Gone Remastered, the notion of tearing across post-apocalyptic Oregon is as inviting as it ever has been and now looks better than it ever did – though expectations should be measured in this regard.
The reason why I’m attempting to set an expectation here is because by and large as a remaster project, Days Gone Remastered follows the incremental blueprint laid down by The Last of Us Part II Remastered, rather than something more radical. This is because the fact remains that the PS5 patch for the PS4 version of Days Gone basically gave a lot of players what they wanted most of all from a remaster – that silky 60 frames per second refresh. So with Days Gone Remastered, the technical improvements are much more subtle though still intriguing nonetheless.
Seemingly using the improved PC version as its technical touchstone, Days Gone Remastered on PS5 makes a whole bunch of rather discrete visual upgrades. Right off the bat, Days Gone Remastered offers up a 1440p/60 frames per second performance preset alongside a 4K/30 frames per second mode that correlates to the PC version running on its highest settings. PS5 Pro owners meanwhile get a sort of best of both worlds style deal where PSSR is used to upscale from 1584p to 4K while still maintaining a liquid smooth 60 frames per second. It’s also worth noting that on PS5 Pro the use of PSSR appears adept, with a very sharp presentation that avoids the usual muddying of detail with foliage and other such elements that a PSSR resolve usually creates – a more than welcome realisation when you recall just how much of the game world is covered with the stuff.
Another improvement that Days Gone Remastered brings is a sizable bump to the resolution of the shadow maps used throughout the game. Providing a 2X increase over the shadow effects used in the PS4 version, Days Gone Remastered‘s shadows shed the largely blotchy look seen in the last gen version and it looks especially impressive as the sun goes down and shadows of nearby structures are cast across the landscape.
Speaking of the weather, Days Gone Remastered also completely overhauls the sky simulation of its game world, implementing such nerdy things as spectral light and ozone simulation to fashion a sky that looks much more realistic than it did before. This has a knock-on effect to the colour grading used too, with light being rendered much more vibrantly and accurately, resulting in a more pleasingly natural look. Thanks to an improved HDR implementation, Days Gone Remastered at night looks vastly darker than the foggy grey of its PS4 counterpart, making this current gen version of Days Gone feel at once more atmospheric and somewhat more pant-wetting than before.
Though Days Gone Remastered looks both significantly sharper and more vibrant than the PS4 version, the changes don’t end there. As part of its leap to current generation console hardware, Days Gone Remastered also brings with it the new ‘Broken Road’ DLC that packs in a big ol’ chunk of additional content. Though the new permadeath mode essentially makes Days Gone feel like a paranoid nightmare (a feeling that is enhanced in no small part by the darker environments), it’s really in the new Horde Assault mode that the Broken Road DLC shines.
A take on the traditional horde mode that makes the most of Days Gone signature feature, Horde Assault tasks you with surviving against an increasingly massive and dangerous horde of infected and has you venturing across a range of areas seen in the main story campaign. The kicker to all of this, is that not only does the world change with each run, but so too can you earn special in-mode rewards and use previously unplayable characters, lending Horde Assault something of a roguelike flavour into the bargain. By essentially distilling Days Gone‘s most compelling aspect (at least to me, anyway) into its own mode, Horde Assault certainly becomes a compelling way to keep you glued to Days Gone Remastered long after the credits have completed their roll.
There are other niceties that Days Gone Remastered brings to the table, too. Not only can you import your cobwebbed PS4 save (and pop a whole heap of trophies in the process – including the platinum trophy), Days Gone Remastered also brings an enhanced photo mode which lets you fiddle about with various time of day settings, logo details and more to help you get that perfect snap.
Of course, a somewhat sad realisation you’ll have when the credits roll on Days Gone Remastered is that a sequel is nowhere close to being on the cards. It’s a bittersweet pang for sure, but unlike a Netflix show that gets canned after the first season and leaves you with a cliffhanger ending, Days Gone Remastered sits quite comfortably on its own and the uninitiated shouldn’t be dissuaded from getting stuck in. That said, Days Gone 2 when, Sony?
For those who have already sampled the grim delights of Days Gone on PS4, paying £10 for the definitive version of one of 2019’s most underrated open world adventures that brings with it a hugely entertaining and worthwhile horde mode, seems like a bargain to me. As for the rest of the package, it really did surprise me just how well Bend Studio’s most marquee effort has endured, offering up a smart take on both open world game design and the zombie apocalypse more broadly that other developers have struggled to match. Put simply, if you haven’t played Days Gone, this is the point where you leap in with both feet.
Days Gone Remastered is out now on PS5 and PS5 Pro.
Review code kindly provided by PR.