Days Gone’s upcoming survival arcade mode will introduce endless hordes and ‘exploding freakers’, and I’m beginning to think it might be the best way to play the game

I was ambivalent about Days Gone when it shambled onto PC in 2021, though my issues were primarily with its clumsy storytelling rather than anything systemic. Exploring the world on Deacon St John’s motorcycle while evading hordes of shambling undead was enjoyable enough, especially when a minor pitstop to pick up some fuel would turn into a cross-country fight for survival.

Hence, I was more than a little curious when Sony announced that the upcoming Broken Road DLC will feature a horde assault mode that focuses squarely on that. With the DLC due to launch in a couple of weeks, Sony has revealed several new details about the mode, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it might turn out to be the best way to play the game.

Described as a “survival arcade” mode by Sony in its recent Steam update, horde assault basically strips all the narrative gubbins from Days Gone and condenses its survivalist feedback loop into a 30-minute battle to the death.

Players drop into the map as Deacon or one of several other playable characters (including six new avatars to inhabit), and must immediately fight through an initial horde simply to get to their bike. Once acquired, players can use the bike to scout out supply boxes that contain more powerful weapons they’ll use to defend themselves, including a brand new weapon—a flamethrower.

Horde assault is designed to be a more intense experience than vanilla Days Gone. Alongside the tighter structure, the mode also increases the size of hordes. Moreover, if you manage to survive for a whole half hour, the game will spawn an “unlimited horde” that will presumably hunt you down until you die.

The mode also features a levelling system that will provide in-mode rewards, including those new playable characters as well as unique injectors. Injectors are a concept carried over from the main story and basically act as game modifiers.

But horde assault expands their number and increases their power, amounting to 12 positive injectors that boost your scoring potential while increasing the game’s challenge, and 12 negative injectors that do the exact opposite. Examples of these include “wanted”, an injector that starts you off at the highest intensity for undead hordes, and “exploding freakers”, which may sound like it’s designed to make the game harder, but is actually intended to help you thin enemy ranks.

While the horde assault mode is designed as an endgame challenge, Sony says the mode will be available to players from the get-go, and should provide an additional 10 hours of play on top of the base game. It’s worth noting this mode isn’t all the Broken Road DLC will add—it also brings a permadeath mode, a speedrun mode, and a photo mode.

Frankly, though, none of this intrigues me anywhere near as much as horde assault. Much as I enjoyed biking around Days Gone’s slice of Oregon, I sometimes wondered whether the size of the open world played against it, dispersing its survival loop across too broad an area. We won’t have long to find out how the new mode shakes things up, the Broken Road DLC arrives on April 25.