Sunset Overdrive Review
Take me down to the Sunset City where the monsters are green and the carnage is pretty.
If you’re worn out on games with drab palettes and dramatic characters, then Sunset Overdrive is just the game you need to lift your spirits. It’s cascading with color and upbeat personality, and its cast is packed with comical caricatures. Sure, its dialogue is vulgar and absurd, but unlike so many games that attempt to be edgy, Sunset Overdrive makes its quips feel natural rather than compelled. It never takes itself too earnestly, which in this case, is a good thing. It’s also a blast to play thanks to it’s movement system and over-the-top weapons. It’s a liberating game that trades in rules and drama for freedom and unspoiled unadulterated enjoyment, and Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, hop off of a skyscraper, and deep-throat up a gang of monsters.
As you’d expect, an absurd game like Sunset Overdrive features an identically absurd plot. It’s the end of days after the evil energy drink corporation, Fizzco, poisoned the citizens of Sunset City, turning them into violent rage animals known as OD. On one forearm, that means you need to fight your way out of the city, on the other palm, that means you get to fight your way out of the city. As a janitor that’s been taken advantage of by Sunset’s hedonistic jacks in the past, it’s eventually your turn dish out the agony, and you get to do it with an over-the-top selection of powerful and ridiculous weaponry.
Before your crusade kicks off, you create a character of your choosing using the character customization system. There’s a superb multiplicity of options to choose from, but should you grow bored with your character, you’re free to go back to the drawing board at any time and revise your appearance. Over the course of your journey, you team up with puny factions of survivors to devise your escape plan, and along the way, you go toe to toe with hundreds of monsters, Fizzco robots, and enemy humans known as scabs. Each faction you fight alongside catapults to a theme: there are the lazy, rich, preppy kids, a scout troop, and a gang of LARPers, to name a few. Tho’ the factions’ characterizations are slightly mocking and exploitative of the groups they represent, there are also slew of times when representatives from each group call out and mock the stereotypes that are so often applied to them, striking a respectful balance.
Make no mistake, however: Sunset Overdrive is immature on all fronts. Almost every character vows up a storm, ripping off f-bombs like it’s going out of style. Gratefully, unlike many games that take this treatment, their foul language feels natural and it reinforces the brash attitude that permeates the game. Largely, the voice actors behind the game’s cast do a commendable job of selling their roles. You’d think that everything would be colored by a hint of doom and gloom given the situation at mitt, but the survivors you meet seem to take it in stride, providing the game a lighthearted and irreverent quality that’s rather uplifting.
Sunset Overdrive is one of the best looking games on the Xbox One, both on a technical and artistic level. The city itself is large, dense with buildings and artifacts, with slew of variation in architectural style. Everything’s glazed in a bright, saturated decorate of paint, providing the game a cartoonish quality that’s effortless to love. When you’re in the midst of battle, sometimes with what seems like a hundred enemies, the screen fills with explosions, bursts of lightning, and periodically bright green trickle. Despite all of the chaos on screen, the framework rate remains rock solid. Sunset Overdrive isn’t meant to look realistic, but that doesn’t disqualify it as a top contender for the best looking Xbox One game. It’s simply beautiful to behold.
Of course, when you’re zipping across town, you’re going to miss a few of the finer details, but you’ll be having too much joy to care. One of Sunset Overdrive’s primary delights is its mobility system, which is liberate and supple in the name of enjoyment. Almost every object and surface is an chance to build up ground, which makes it effortless to travel excellent distances with speed and grace. You can grind along most objects, including telephone lines, ledges, handrails, and the like. Cars, awnings, and harass ducts act as trampolines that send you skyward, permitting you to work your way up and over buildings with ease. You can also wall-run indefinitely and, eventually, dash in mid-air and run atop bods of water.
The only downside to the emphasis on movement is that if you find yourself standing in place in the middle of combat, you’re going to be disciplined. It’s effortless to become perplexed by dozens of enemies at once if you’re fighting while stationary, and they can quickly whittle away your health. There are times when your instincts tell you to fight rather than flee, but despite your best intentions, this is uncommonly the right decision.
Stringing movements together not only gets you to your destination securely and quickly, but it exemplifies what Sunset Overdrive is all about. Sometimes you slightly miss your target, but that’s OK, because the game’s very forgiving when it comes to timing and aiming. Once you get the suspend of each stir, you can free-run from one end of the city to another without ever touching the ground. The more tricks you use, the more style points you earn. As you pack up your style gauge, you activate elemental and stat boosts that make you more effective in battle. These “Amps” can be applied to you or your weapons, and are purchased with collectibles that are sprayed across Sunset City. Similar to the open world game Crackdown, you have to explore every nook and cranny of the city to find them, but you can make it lighter on yourself by purchasing maps for each type of collectible.
Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, leap off of a skyscraper, and gargle up a gang of monsters.
As you perform certain deeds, such as grinding, using automatic weapons, and air dashing, you earn badges that can be traded in for overdrives. Overdrives are another form of upgrade, which are similar to amps, but they’re earned a different way. They can be applied to your character to increase style-point generation, boost weapon strength, or grant you health augmentations. Inbetween Amps and Overdrives, there are a seemingly endless number of ways to upgrade your character and remix their strengths. If you want to explore the total range of options, you’re going to spend a lot of time gathering collectibles, and even more time generating badges to unlock the best Overdrives.
Like the movement system, Sunset Overdrive’s weapons are wild and varied enough to keep you entertained well beyond the end of the main mission path. Unlocking some weapons requires an absurd amount of the game’s energy drink currency to unlock, and your best bet to earn them is to tackle the large selection of side missions, or to replay old missions for better rankings. You take aim with the likes of an acid sprinkler, a bowling ball cannon, an explosive teddy bear launcher, and a gun that bombards enemies with fireworks and illusionary Chinese dragons. Sometimes it’s hard to choose which weapons to bring into battle, not because you need specific equipment, but because there are so many good options to choose from.
Unluckily, one of the few issues with the game is its selection of mission types. For a while, it feels like all you’re doing are fetch quests. Someone needs supplies and they need you to go get them. It certainly helps that moving and shooting are so joy, but you still pine for something different after the dozenth fetch quest in a row. Give it time, however, and you’ll eventually detect a broad multitude of challenges, including a hefty dose of traversal challenges and combat scripts to keep you busy and beef up your resources.
There are also more than a few excellent boss battles that challenge your capability to act quickly and budge effectively, and these are some of the best moments in the game. Just when you think you’re on the brink of boredom, an over-the-top mission shows up, reigniting your enthusiasm. If you’ve always dreamed of taking on a massive inflatable mascot, similar to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, there’s a boss battle for that. Maybe you’ve desired to pursue a train by grinding on rails, or you have a searing desire to rail on the back of a massive dragon that’s winding through a vast cityscape. It’s not that there’s no joy to be had in Sunset Overdrive’s typical missions, but the imaginative and surprising boss fights provide an pleasurable and taxing challenge.
You can loosely replay any mission at a moment’s notice, but eventually you’ll want to leap online and screw around Sunset City with your friends. Hop into the Chaos Squad booths around the map, and you and a team of seven other warriors can tackle horde-like throngs of enemies, defend outposts, and put your traversal abilities to the test. Sunset Overdrive emphasizes cooperation, but team members are awarded for their individual spectacle. Across the course of the game, you fight alongside computer-controlled warriors, but they’re mostly futile fodder. In Chaos Squad, you’re working with other tricked out players that are capable of zipping to-and-fro with a cache of arms at the ready. It feels like you’re part of a stylish, amoral Justice League. Unluckily, the difficulty of co-up doesn’t scale based on the number of players in your party. With fewer than eight people, some Chaos Squad challenges are simply too hard; with fewer than four, you’re almost always asking for trouble.
Insomniac Games has crafted an excellent game in Sunset Overdrive. It’s not without a few niggling issues, but you’ll be too busy loving yourself to care. You can compare it to games like Crackdown, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Ratchet and Clank, but by combining the best elements of those games into a single package and injecting it with an anything goes, rock and roll attitude, you’ll never think of it as anything but a singular achievement that stands tall on its own merits. It’s one of the best games on the Xbox One, and a refreshing shot of merriment.
Sunset Overdrive Review
Sunset Overdrive Review
Take me down to the Sunset City where the monsters are green and the carnage is pretty.
If you’re worn out on games with drab palettes and dramatic characters, then Sunset Overdrive is just the game you need to lift your spirits. It’s dribbling with color and upbeat personality, and its cast is packed with comical caricatures. Sure, its dialogue is vulgar and absurd, but unlike so many games that attempt to be edgy, Sunset Overdrive makes its quips feel natural rather than coerced. It never takes itself too gravely, which in this case, is a good thing. It’s also a blast to play thanks to it’s movement system and over-the-top weapons. It’s a liberating game that trades in rules and drama for freedom and unspoiled unadulterated enjoyment, and Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, leap off of a skyscraper, and deepthroat up a gang of monsters.
As you’d expect, an absurd game like Sunset Overdrive features an identically absurd plot. It’s the end of days after the evil energy drink corporation, Fizzco, poisoned the citizens of Sunset City, turning them into violent rage animals known as OD. On one forearm, that means you need to fight your way out of the city, on the other palm, that means you get to fight your way out of the city. As a janitor that’s been taken advantage of by Sunset’s hedonistic milks in the past, it’s eventually your turn dish out the ache, and you get to do it with an over-the-top selection of powerful and ridiculous weaponry.
Before your crusade kicks off, you create a character of your choosing using the character customization system. There’s a fine diversity of options to choose from, but should you grow bored with your character, you’re free to go back to the drawing board at any time and revise your appearance. Over the course of your journey, you team up with petite factions of survivors to devise your escape plan, and along the way, you go toe to toe with hundreds of monsters, Fizzco robots, and enemy humans known as scabs. Each faction you fight alongside rams to a theme: there are the lazy, rich, preppy kids, a scout troop, and a gang of LARPers, to name a few. However the factions’ characterizations are slightly mocking and exploitative of the groups they represent, there are also slew of times when representatives from each group call out and mock the stereotypes that are so often applied to them, striking a respectful balance.
Make no mistake, however: Sunset Overdrive is immature on all fronts. Almost every character vows up a storm, ripping off f-bombs like it’s going out of style. Gratefully, unlike many games that take this treatment, their foul language feels natural and it reinforces the brash attitude that permeates the game. Largely, the voice actors behind the game’s cast do a commendable job of selling their roles. You’d think that everything would be colored by a hint of doom and gloom given the situation at mitt, but the survivors you meet seem to take it in stride, providing the game a lighthearted and irreverent quality that’s rather uplifting.
Sunset Overdrive is one of the best looking games on the Xbox One, both on a technical and artistic level. The city itself is large, dense with buildings and artifacts, with slew of variation in architectural style. Everything’s covered in a bright, saturated decorate of paint, providing the game a cartoonish quality that’s effortless to love. When you’re in the midst of battle, sometimes with what seems like a hundred enemies, the screen fills with explosions, bursts of lightning, and from time to time bright green trickle. Despite all of the chaos on screen, the framework rate remains rock solid. Sunset Overdrive isn’t meant to look realistic, but that doesn’t disqualify it as a top contender for the best looking Xbox One game. It’s simply beautiful to behold.
Of course, when you’re zipping across town, you’re going to miss a few of the finer details, but you’ll be having too much joy to care. One of Sunset Overdrive’s primary delights is its mobility system, which is liberate and limber in the name of enjoyment. Almost every object and surface is an chance to build up ground, which makes it effortless to travel excellent distances with speed and grace. You can grind along most objects, including telephone lines, ledges, handrails, and the like. Cars, awnings, and harass ducts act as trampolines that send you skyward, permitting you to work your way up and over buildings with ease. You can also wall-run indefinitely and, eventually, dash in mid-air and run atop figures of water.
The only downside to the emphasis on movement is that if you find yourself standing in place in the middle of combat, you’re going to be disciplined. It’s effortless to become dazed by dozens of enemies at once if you’re fighting while stationary, and they can quickly whittle away your health. There are times when your instincts tell you to fight rather than flee, but despite your best intentions, this is infrequently the right decision.
Stringing movements together not only gets you to your destination securely and quickly, but it exemplifies what Sunset Overdrive is all about. Sometimes you slightly miss your target, but that’s OK, because the game’s very forgiving when it comes to timing and aiming. Once you get the dangle of each budge, you can free-run from one end of the city to another without ever touching the ground. The more tricks you use, the more style points you earn. As you pack up your style gauge, you activate elemental and stat boosts that make you more effective in battle. These “Amps” can be applied to you or your weapons, and are purchased with collectibles that are sprayed across Sunset City. Similar to the open world game Crackdown, you have to explore every nook and cranny of the city to find them, but you can make it lighter on yourself by purchasing maps for each type of collectible.
Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, hop off of a skyscraper, and deepthroat up a gang of monsters.
As you perform certain deeds, such as grinding, using automatic weapons, and air dashing, you earn badges that can be traded in for overdrives. Overdrives are another form of upgrade, which are similar to amps, but they’re earned a different way. They can be applied to your character to increase style-point generation, boost weapon strength, or grant you health augmentations. Inbetween Amps and Overdrives, there are a seemingly endless number of ways to upgrade your character and remix their strengths. If you want to explore the total range of options, you’re going to spend a lot of time gathering collectibles, and even more time generating badges to unlock the best Overdrives.
Like the movement system, Sunset Overdrive’s weapons are wild and varied enough to keep you entertained well beyond the end of the main mission path. Unlocking some weapons requires an absurd amount of the game’s energy drink currency to unlock, and your best bet to earn them is to tackle the large selection of side missions, or to replay old missions for better rankings. You take aim with the likes of an acid sprinkler, a bowling ball cannon, an explosive teddy bear launcher, and a gun that bombards enemies with fireworks and illusionary Chinese dragons. Sometimes it’s hard to choose which weapons to bring into battle, not because you need specific equipment, but because there are so many good options to choose from.
Unluckily, one of the few issues with the game is its selection of mission types. For a while, it feels like all you’re doing are fetch quests. Someone needs supplies and they need you to go get them. It undoubtedly helps that moving and shooting are so joy, but you still pine for something different after the dozenth fetch quest in a row. Give it time, however, and you’ll eventually detect a broad diversity of challenges, including a hefty dose of traversal challenges and combat screenplays to keep you busy and beef up your resources.
There are also more than a few fine boss battles that challenge your capability to act quickly and budge effectively, and these are some of the best moments in the game. Just when you think you’re on the edge of boredom, an over-the-top mission emerges, reigniting your enthusiasm. If you’ve always dreamed of taking on a massive inflatable mascot, similar to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, there’s a boss battle for that. Maybe you’ve desired to pursue a train by grinding on rails, or you have a searing desire to rail on the back of a massive dragon that’s winding through a vast cityscape. It’s not that there’s no joy to be had in Sunset Overdrive’s typical missions, but the imaginative and surprising boss fights provide an pleasant and taxing challenge.
You can loosely replay any mission at a moment’s notice, but eventually you’ll want to leap online and screw around Sunset City with your friends. Hop into the Chaos Squad booths around the map, and you and a team of seven other warriors can tackle horde-like throngs of enemies, defend outposts, and put your traversal abilities to the test. Sunset Overdrive emphasizes cooperation, but team members are awarded for their individual spectacle. Via the course of the game, you fight alongside computer-controlled warriors, but they’re mostly worthless fodder. In Chaos Squad, you’re working with other tricked out players that are capable of zipping to-and-fro with a cache of arms at the ready. It feels like you’re part of a stylish, amoral Justice League. Unluckily, the difficulty of co-up doesn’t scale based on the number of players in your party. With fewer than eight people, some Chaos Squad challenges are simply too hard; with fewer than four, you’re almost always asking for trouble.
Insomniac Games has crafted an excellent game in Sunset Overdrive. It’s not without a few niggling issues, but you’ll be too busy liking yourself to care. You can compare it to games like Crackdown, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Ratchet and Clank, but by combining the best elements of those games into a single package and injecting it with an anything goes, rock and roll attitude, you’ll never think of it as anything but a singular achievement that stands tall on its own merits. It’s one of the best games on the Xbox One, and a refreshing shot of merriment.
Sunset Overdrive Review
Sunset Overdrive Review
Take me down to the Sunset City where the monsters are green and the carnage is pretty.
If you’re worn out on games with drab palettes and dramatic characters, then Sunset Overdrive is just the game you need to lift your spirits. It’s cascading with color and upbeat personality, and its cast is packed with comical caricatures. Sure, its dialogue is vulgar and absurd, but unlike so many games that attempt to be edgy, Sunset Overdrive makes its quips feel natural rather than coerced. It never takes itself too earnestly, which in this case, is a good thing. It’s also a blast to play thanks to it’s movement system and over-the-top weapons. It’s a liberating game that trades in rules and drama for freedom and unspoiled unadulterated enjoyment, and Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, leap off of a skyscraper, and suck up a gang of monsters.
As you’d expect, an absurd game like Sunset Overdrive features an identically absurd plot. It’s the end of days after the evil energy drink corporation, Fizzco, poisoned the citizens of Sunset City, turning them into violent rage animals known as OD. On one palm, that means you need to fight your way out of the city, on the other mitt, that means you get to fight your way out of the city. As a janitor that’s been taken advantage of by Sunset’s hedonistic wanks in the past, it’s eventually your turn dish out the anguish, and you get to do it with an over-the-top selection of powerful and ridiculous weaponry.
Before your crusade kicks off, you create a character of your choosing using the character customization system. There’s a superb multitude of options to choose from, but should you grow bored with your character, you’re free to go back to the drawing board at any time and revise your appearance. Over the course of your journey, you team up with puny factions of survivors to devise your escape plan, and along the way, you go toe to toe with hundreds of monsters, Fizzco robots, and enemy humans known as scabs. Each faction you fight alongside wedges to a theme: there are the lazy, rich, preppy kids, a scout troop, and a gang of LARPers, to name a few. However the factions’ characterizations are slightly mocking and exploitative of the groups they represent, there are also slew of times when representatives from each group call out and mock the stereotypes that are so often applied to them, striking a respectful balance.
Make no mistake, however: Sunset Overdrive is immature on all fronts. Almost every character vows up a storm, ripping off f-bombs like it’s going out of style. Gratefully, unlike many games that take this treatment, their foul language feels natural and it reinforces the brash attitude that permeates the game. Largely, the voice actors behind the game’s cast do a commendable job of selling their roles. You’d think that everything would be colored by a hint of doom and gloom given the situation at forearm, but the survivors you meet seem to take it in stride, providing the game a lighthearted and irreverent quality that’s rather uplifting.
Sunset Overdrive is one of the best looking games on the Xbox One, both on a technical and artistic level. The city itself is large, dense with buildings and artifacts, with slew of variation in architectural style. Everything’s covered in a bright, saturated decorate of paint, providing the game a cartoonish quality that’s effortless to love. When you’re in the midst of battle, sometimes with what seems like a hundred enemies, the screen fills with explosions, bursts of lightning, and at times bright green trickle. Despite all of the chaos on screen, the framework rate remains rock solid. Sunset Overdrive isn’t meant to look realistic, but that doesn’t disqualify it as a top contender for the best looking Xbox One game. It’s simply beautiful to behold.
Of course, when you’re zipping across town, you’re going to miss a few of the finer details, but you’ll be having too much joy to care. One of Sunset Overdrive’s primary delights is its mobility system, which is liberate and limber in the name of enjoyment. Almost every object and surface is an chance to build up ground, which makes it effortless to travel good distances with speed and grace. You can grind along most objects, including telephone lines, ledges, handrails, and the like. Cars, awnings, and harass ducts act as trampolines that send you skyward, permitting you to work your way up and over buildings with ease. You can also wall-run indefinitely and, eventually, dash in mid-air and run atop figures of water.
The only downside to the emphasis on movement is that if you find yourself standing in place in the middle of combat, you’re going to be disciplined. It’s effortless to become dazed by dozens of enemies at once if you’re fighting while stationary, and they can quickly whittle away your health. There are times when your instincts tell you to fight rather than flee, but despite your best intentions, this is infrequently the right decision.
Stringing movements together not only gets you to your destination securely and quickly, but it exemplifies what Sunset Overdrive is all about. Sometimes you slightly miss your target, but that’s OK, because the game’s very forgiving when it comes to timing and aiming. Once you get the drape of each budge, you can free-run from one end of the city to another without ever touching the ground. The more tricks you use, the more style points you earn. As you pack up your style gauge, you activate elemental and stat boosts that make you more effective in battle. These “Amps” can be applied to you or your weapons, and are purchased with collectibles that are sprayed via Sunset City. Similar to the open world game Crackdown, you have to explore every nook and cranny of the city to find them, but you can make it lighter on yourself by purchasing maps for each type of collectible.
Sunset Overdrive never pretends to be anything but an excuse to swear like a sailor, hop off of a skyscraper, and gargle up a gang of monsters.
As you perform certain deeds, such as grinding, using automatic weapons, and air dashing, you earn badges that can be traded in for overdrives. Overdrives are another form of upgrade, which are similar to amps, but they’re earned a different way. They can be applied to your character to increase style-point generation, boost weapon strength, or grant you health augmentations. Inbetween Amps and Overdrives, there are a seemingly endless number of ways to upgrade your character and remix their strengths. If you want to explore the total range of options, you’re going to spend a lot of time gathering collectibles, and even more time generating badges to unlock the best Overdrives.
Like the movement system, Sunset Overdrive’s weapons are wild and varied enough to keep you entertained well beyond the end of the main mission path. Unlocking some weapons requires an absurd amount of the game’s energy drink currency to unlock, and your best bet to earn them is to tackle the large selection of side missions, or to replay old missions for better rankings. You take aim with the likes of an acid sprinkler, a bowling ball cannon, an explosive teddy bear launcher, and a gun that bombards enemies with fireworks and illusionary Chinese dragons. Sometimes it’s hard to choose which weapons to bring into battle, not because you need specific equipment, but because there are so many good options to choose from.
Unluckily, one of the few issues with the game is its selection of mission types. For a while, it feels like all you’re doing are fetch quests. Someone needs supplies and they need you to go get them. It certainly helps that moving and shooting are so joy, but you still pine for something different after the dozenth fetch quest in a row. Give it time, however, and you’ll eventually detect a broad multiplicity of challenges, including a hefty dose of traversal challenges and combat scripts to keep you busy and beef up your resources.
There are also more than a few good boss battles that challenge your capability to act quickly and budge effectively, and these are some of the best moments in the game. Just when you think you’re on the edge of boredom, an over-the-top mission shows up, reigniting your enthusiasm. If you’ve always dreamed of taking on a massive inflatable mascot, similar to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, there’s a boss battle for that. Maybe you’ve dreamed to pursue a train by grinding on rails, or you have a searing desire to rail on the back of a massive dragon that’s winding through a vast cityscape. It’s not that there’s no joy to be had in Sunset Overdrive’s typical missions, but the imaginative and surprising boss fights provide an pleasurable and taxing challenge.
You can loosely replay any mission at a moment’s notice, but eventually you’ll want to hop online and screw around Sunset City with your friends. Hop into the Chaos Squad booths around the map, and you and a team of seven other warriors can tackle horde-like throngs of enemies, defend outposts, and put your traversal abilities to the test. Sunset Overdrive emphasizes cooperation, but team members are awarded for their individual spectacle. Across the course of the game, you fight alongside computer-controlled warriors, but they’re mostly futile fodder. In Chaos Squad, you’re working with other tricked out players that are capable of zipping to-and-fro with a cache of arms at the ready. It feels like you’re part of a stylish, amoral Justice League. Unluckily, the difficulty of co-up doesn’t scale based on the number of players in your party. With fewer than eight people, some Chaos Squad challenges are simply too hard; with fewer than four, you’re almost always asking for trouble.
Insomniac Games has crafted an excellent game in Sunset Overdrive. It’s not without a few niggling issues, but you’ll be too busy loving yourself to care. You can compare it to games like Crackdown, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Ratchet and Clank, but by combining the best elements of those games into a single package and injecting it with an anything goes, rock and roll attitude, you’ll never think of it as anything but a singular achievement that stands tall on its own merits. It’s one of the best games on the Xbox One, and a refreshing shot of merriment.
Sunset Overdrive Review
Sunset Overdrive Review
Sunset Overdrive has ruined my attention span, and honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. During my 30-hour tour through developer Insomniac’s insane but endearing depiction of the apocalypse, I strayed off the hammered path more than I have in any other open-world game in latest memory. Despite the mini-map encouraging me to head four hundred meters east, I couldn’t help but veer off the route at every chance.
This isn’t due to a lack of interesting things to do, but rather a testament to the abundance of them. Because of Sunset’s superb traversal, impeccable comedic writing, and wealth of upgrade paths for my character and weapons, I was more than blessed to take the road less traveled. More often than not, it led me someplace that I’m meticulously glad I visited.
Sunset Overdrive visually pops, like the Easter Bunny on an acid excursion. Its bright colors, punk-rock attitude, and nose turned up in the direction of authority all meld together wonderfully. Like the cult-classic Jet Set Radio, Sunset assaulted my senses with a never-ending barrage of stimulus. Monsters explode into an ocean of bright-orange viscera, certain weapons permit you fire off a torrent of blazing fireworks, and freezing enemies will result in the word “BRRRR” appearing in the air above them. I truly appreciate that Insomniac has crafted a world that successfully adheres to a strong, unique, and artistic vision.
This distinct style transcends aesthetics, and actually aids in Sunset’s most successful and often-used mechanics. Like most any open-world game, the mission structure here has you talking to a character at point A, making your way across the map to point B, and engaging in some activity that usually results in being sent to collect a prize at point C. While that structure might sound monotonous, Sunset makes the very act of traversal a constant joy instead of an obligatory trudge. I infrequently found myself using the rapid travel system, because this is a game that’s about the journey as much as the destination.
Narrative conceit be damned, your hero or heroine can, using nothing but their own two feet, bounce off anything remotely buoyant, dash through the air, and grind on all manners of power lines, billboards, and anything that presents a right angle — now all I want is for Insomniac to make a Spider-Man game. In fact all of this is encouraged thanks to a punitively slow regular ground running speed, the prizes of a wise combo system, and an ridiculous abundance of monsters, soldiers, and robots. Earnestly, if you find yourself on the ground for more than ten seconds, neglected of your godly mobility, chances are you’re going to end up dead shortly after that. But Sunset wisely avoids harsh penalties with quick respawns with amusing animations that lovingly pay homage – in clever ways – to dozens of classic works, from Portal to Terminator to Night of the Living Dead.
As long as you keep moving and refrain from protracted on the ground, Sunset’s combat proves to be deep, entertaining, and rewarding. I loved fighting enemies like the giant Hurkers, as each encounter felt like a mini-boss fight in and of itself. There’s a good sense of pressure in attempting to stay moving while maintaining the high ground. And thanks to Sunset’s deep and varied arsenal, I found myself creating some truly interesting combos: I’d begin off by peppering the area with freeze bombs, which bought me enough time to lay down a field of Acid Sprinklers, and finish it all off with a cascade of exploding teddy bears.
While all of that looks and feels awesome in mobility, it certainly isn’t effortless. The controls in Sunset aren’t plain: by the time you build up a total suite of weapons and traversal abilities, your mitts will be getting a serious workout attempting to manage them all. But while it certainly felt cumbersome primarily, leading to a open up of hours where my fingers always felt just a fraction of a 2nd behind where my mind was, I eventually acclimated to the sophisticated system and even grew to appreciate it.
For sure, by the end of the campaign, I still found myself having to work to navigate this hand-eye-coordination spaghetti cup when I had to grind on a wire, kill a horde of monsters below me, hop off, switch weapons and kill an airborne bat-thingy, and air dash towards the nearest bounding so I could wall-ride around its outside. But while it might be a bit complicated, the result of mastering the system and eventually being able to make it across the entirety of the city without ever setting foot on the pavement is frantically satisfying.
That prior example of insanity is just one of hundreds that I reminisce fondly. I love telling other people my stories about my time in Sunset Overdrive, because they seem to be just that: my stories. If I dreamed to put on a wolf mask and fire off explosive teddy bears at a group of robots, I could do just that. Sunset treats its open world as a canvas for you to express yourself aesthetically, through movement, and of course, through combat.
It also felt personalized by the fact that weapons and abilities are upgraded based on how often you use them. The more I bounced across the city, the more opportunities I had to add an explosion to my leaps. Everytime I killed a robot with an Acid Sprinkler, I inched closer to upgrading both my weapon, as well as my abilities against robots. Not only does it prize your playstyle, but it also encouraged me to experiment with other weapons in order to see how they’d evolve over time.
Combat reaches fresh levels of insanity when you hop into Chaos Squad, Sunset Overdrive’s eight-player cooperative multiplayer missions. These unfold as wave-based siege defenses where you’re given a brief amount of time to lay traps and coordinate with your friends before all hell cracks liberate. The ensuing spectacle of blood, guts, lightning, ice, lasers, and giant fireworks is insanity of the highest caliber. But while Chaos Squad is a neat diversion, it didn’t grab me fairly as tightly as the single-player campaign managed to.
Weaving in and out of this self-expression is also one of most consistently funny scripts in latest memory. From pop culture deep cuts to fourth-wall-breaking remarks about the nature of movie games, I found myself genuinely laughing at Sunset Overdrive across the entire campaign. The voice work is superb, the supporting cast is varied and interesting (spend thirty seconds with the robot dog and it’s raunchy not to fall in love), and I found myself weirdly obsessed with uncovering the events that led to this apocalypse.