“Gone in the Past” tells the story of Deacon, a motorcycle rider played by the player, who rides a motorcycle, holds a stick and gun, and kills enemies in a world full of mutants in order to find the truth about his wife’s death all the way . The survival game of the apocalypse can be said to be a popular theme in the past two years. However, in the shaping of the open world , “Gone in the Past” is not free from formulaic design. Large and small camps, mountains of material resources, collectibles everywhere, and routine “random” events, these commonplace contents constitute the entire open world exploration stage of “Gone in the Past”.
Fortunately, the game’s graphics performance is excellent. Relying on strong technical strength, “The Past is No Longer” presents a quite realistic doomsday world for players. The story takes place in the Oregon region of the US. With the change of the region, from forests , snow mountains to mountain roads, volcanic mouth lakes , the game shows a rich scene and is very consistent with the terrain characteristics in the real world.
Just looking at the surface, the whole game reveals a breath from nature. Due to the outbreak of infection, the human area has been devastated, the dilapidated houses and buildings have become the lair of mutants, and the abandoned cars on the main roads have piled up. Survivors can only leave the urban jungle of reinforced concrete and return to the more primitive camp mode to survive. This forms a strong contrast with the natural environment, which is impressive.
The realistic and delicate scene modeling, broad vision performance, and vast and complex terrain make players have a strong desire to explore after entering the game. Eliminate bandits and bandits in the wild strongholds, collect resources in dilapidated towns, burn mutant nests, and solve some random events according to leads. The above content is not new, but it is easy for most players to get started and can be easily mastered without spending a lot of effort to understand and learn tutorials. However, in the later stage, these formulaic gameplay patterns are still easy to create a sense of repetition.
[Infiltrate the combat system where assassination and straightforward mowing coexist]
The combat experience of “Once Upon a Time” is significantly different in the early and late stages. In the early stages, players’ skills and equipment are not yet systematic, and the variety of props is not rich enough to face a large number of enemies at the same time. Therefore, infiltration and assassination have become the main combat mode. As the level increases and skills and weapons are gradually unlocked, players’ combat effectiveness will be greatly enhanced. At this time, even if facing the zombie tide, they still have the ability to fight.
In the early stages of the game, players often cannot gain much advantage by confronting enemies head-on. At this stage, it is necessary to use abandoned vehicles, walls, bushes, etc. as cover, and wait for the enemy to not investigate and give a fatal blow from behind. Fortunately, most of the enemies encountered during this period have weak perception abilities, so it is not very difficult to kill them one by one.
Searching for resources, planning infiltration routes, and using limited resources to kill more enemies, the early stages of the game still have a very survival-like experience.
The combat mode of this game is basically the same as the survival action game on the market. The melee is mainly based on swinging various sticks and knives, and the long-range is a more standard third-person over-the-shoulder shooting. Players can also use various throwing props and traps to kill the enemy.
With the unlocking of powerful melee skills, the player’s mode of operation will also change accordingly. Skills such as Bull Collision, Home Run, and Clearing can allow players to easily kill minions without the need for sneaky attacks from behind. Therefore, the difficulty and playability of battles in the later stages of the game are mainly reflected in the fight against the huge wave of zombies. The scattered soldiers in the wilderness and towns do not pose any threat to players.
The skill levels in the game are not many, and the preconditions are relatively simple. Therefore, whether it is close combat or far-reaching system, it does not require too much cost to learn some advanced skills. Proper skill point planning can quickly reduce the difficulty of the game, which is far from the step-by-step combat strategy in the early stage.
In addition, both assassination and frontal slashing in the game have a strong sense of power and a strong bloody taste. Using a spike bat, fire axe, and machete to kill mutants like cutting vegetables is very exciting.
As for the long-range weapons, useful to deal with a large number of corpses of machine guns, long-range penetrating sniper rifles, suitable for sneaking into combat crossbows, carry-on small pistols and conventional combat rifles, submachine guns and other categories, the use of these weapons and conventional shooting games are no different, players are basically depending on the situation and their own preferences to choose, the overall standard, but due to the number of bullets carrying restrictions, the firearms can not be used as unscrupulous as some other shooting games.
The role of throwing props was naturally the same as that of most shooting games. In addition to burning the mutant’s lair, the biggest role was to use machine guns and other weapons to kill a huge number of zombie hordes. The scene when the zombie hordes appeared in the game was extremely spectacular, and when they encountered it in the early stage, they could only drive away, but with the improvement of players’ combat effectiveness, using the terrain, gasoline cans in the scene, etc., with gasoline bombs, grenades, machine guns and other range killing weapons to destroy the zombie hordes was not a fantasy. This was also the most challenging content in the game. Of course, the sense of achievement brought by doing their best to eliminate the zombie hordes was also unparalleled.
Fighting against the zombie horde in the sawmill is personally considered to be the most exciting battle in the game. The terrain of the sawmill is complex and changeable, uneven, both indoor and outdoor can be moved, and there are more interactive elements, which not only enriches the player’s playing style, but also the road extending in all directions makes it easy for players to turn corners and encounter ghosts, which enhances the sense of urgency of the battle and makes it more exciting.
[“Fast” like exploration mode]
In “Once Upon a Time”, motorcycles are the most important “companions” for players in their daily exploration. Players need to modify the motorcycles to improve their performance such as speed, durability, fuel consumption, and ammunition storage. In addition, the appearance of the motorcycles can also be modified. The depth of the modification system in the game cannot be compared with some professional racing games, but it is intuitive and easy to understand.
In “The Past is No Longer “, motorcycles also need to be refueled and repaired. In the early stages of the game, before modifying the fuel tank capacity, the speed of fuel depletion is very fast, which leads to players often having to search for fuel during exploration. Similar to the horse maintenance in ” Red Dead Redemption 2 “, the seemingly extremely realistic system sometimes may not bring players a good experience. Frequent refueling with gasoline cans is inevitably annoying. In addition, motorcycles in the game are also responsible for wilderness archiving and fast teleportation. The role and status of motorcycles in daily games are basically irreplaceable, which highlights the problem of cumbersome refueling settings.
In short, the feeling of riding a motorcycle in the wilderness in the game is certainly refreshing, but due to the influence of durability and fuel settings, players often cannot achieve true speed and freedom.
Finally, I want to mention the storyline system. The main storyline of this game is different from that of general games. Each storyline has several tasks that need to be completed, and these tasks are often staggered. This breaks away from the linear process mode of general games, but due to the lack of plot explanation and connection, the overall visual experience of the game’s plot appears fragmented and lacks coherence.
[Review Summary]
Under the strong visual performance, “The Past is No Longer” creates a more realistic apocalyptic world, and the audio-visual experience of the game is no less than that of several previous Sony exclusive works. However, the open-world gameplay of the game is too formulaic. When entering the game, players can basically understand the routine gameplay of the entire game by looking at resources, strongholds, trust levels, etc., lacking eye-catching features. As for the combat part, although the rhythm contrast between the early and late stages of the game is relatively large, it seems somewhat contradictory, but overall it is still very smooth and refreshing, especially the part of fighting against the zombie tide, which is one of the commendable highlights of the game.
