In the past, Insomniac games worked mostly with Sony to produce games like the Spyro, Ratchet & Clank, and Resistance series. Now the developers have changed sides, and their latest game, Sunset Overdrive, is an Xbox One-exclusive title.
Energy drinks don’t just give you wings
Life in Sunset City really is a drag. The whole town is celebrating the release of a new energy drink called “Overcharge”, and your job is to follow the crowds around and pick up their trash. All of a sudden, however, all hell breaks loose when everyone who’s been drinking the new drink is transformed into dangerous monsters addicted to the stuff. Not a very pretty sight, but for the main character it’s a chance to finally live a little and do something for once.
It’s up to the player to decide how exactly the nameless main character will look and what kind of clothes he’ll wear. At the beginning of the game you have all kinds of options for designing your character however you want to. Man or woman? Short hair, a cool mohawk, or dreadlocks? Is his hair green, or rather a mix of green and red? And then there are facial features and stature, as well as the possibility of wearing a mask. Once you’ve decided what your character is going to look like, there are still a lot of things to choose. With hundreds of clothing combinations to choose from, each player can create a character with a style all his or her own. And during the course of the game, there are all kinds of additional options that can be unlocked.
On top of all that, you can equip your character with “Overdrives” and “Amps” to make him or her more powerful. You get Overdrives, passive buffs, by collecting and crafting Badges, which you earn by doing certain specific tasks. The special abilities known as Amps can be created by combing the streets of Sunset City for various collectible items and bringing them to the NPC Floyd. While Floyd is producing the new Amp, the player has to defend his base from hordes of enemies trying to get in.
Weaponized insanity
In your fight against the mutant Overcharge Drinkers (“The OD”), you will have at your disposal the most insane arsenal you’ve ever seen. The weapons could have easily come from Dead Rising or Saints Row: The Third. “High Fidelity” launches vinyl records, “The Dude” spews flaming bowling balls, and “TnTeddy” blows up enemies with exploding teddy bears. Each weapon can be upgraded and even equipped with certain Amps. You can also get your hands on traps, which you can set up and watch as your monster kill count kicks up a few notches.
Your main ways of getting around in the open world of Sunset City are grinding and bouncing. The city is designed in such a way that you can slide on rails, wires, or fences and use cars, plants, and umbrellas like they were trampolines. Water’s no obstacle, either, and even Jesus will think you look cool gliding across the surface. You can travel across the city for several minutes without ever touching the ground – and you should definitely try to avoid the ground as much as you can.
Facing the spawn of hell
Linger on the streets or rooftops, and you might find that you’re soon surrounded by hundreds of OD. Most of them are pretty easy to dispatch, but there are also advanced specimens that are a lot tougher or even capable of launching slime at you. But along with the mutant OD there are also human enemies known as Scabs to take out, as well as Fizzco Robots. So you can expect to find a pretty big selection of bizarre enemies requiring the skilled use of your weapons and Amps.
Of all gameplay issues in Sunset Overdrive, this skilled use of the controls is probably going to cause you some trouble at first, as sometimes there can be a slight delay between pressing a button on the controller and the action being carried out in the game, but luckily it seldom happens that movements aren’t carried out as intended. For example, when you’re running up walls it can sometimes happen that the game doesn’t quite recognize that you want to run to a corner, and the character falls to his death. While it does take a little while to get used to the awkward controls, this is easy to overlook, because Sunset Overdrive is an incredibly fun game. And next to the ridiculous weapons and freakish enemies, there are also lots of crazy characters who provide the player with missions to be completed in the single player campaign. There are also a few side missions, tons of objects to collect, as well as other kinds of challenges. Collectible objects include “Fizzie Balloons”, old gym shoes, toilet paper, smartphones, and Overcharge signs. There’s enough variety to provide several additional hours of entertaining gameplay.
Extreme color explosion
Sunset Overdrive is a gaudy color spectacular that looks as wacky as it plays. The mix of loud and bright colors brings Sunset City to life in a way you’re not likely to have seen in many other FPS games – although there could have been more actual life in Sunset City. As you go through the city, somehow everything looks kind of static. On the other hand, the game never lags, even when you’re fighting countless enemies on-screen, and things always run smoothly thanks to a consistent frame rate.
Even though the missions where you have to defend a base always take place at night, there isn’t any dynamic day/night cycle in Sunset Overdrive. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though, as it’s simply more fun to grind, bounce, and blast your way through a garishly colored city by day than it would be by night. Character and enemy animations are also really well done and all figures move about smoothly through the game world.
Accompanying the in-game action is a punk rock soundtrack that makes life in Sunset City that much more pleasant. Voice recordings are excellent more the most part, as well.
Ever heard the one about the diver?
Sunset Overdrive definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is just brimming with jabs at the entertainment industry. Some of the more notable examples are digs at Breaking Bad, Portal, and Assassin’s Creed. But it’s not just these pop culture references that will strain your face muscles – character dialogues are just overflowing with humor, as well. And then there’s all the respawn animations. Instead of just popping back up in the game, the character is brought back a total of 18 different ways – you might climb out of a coffin like a vampire, be brought back by a UFO, crawl out of the ground like a zombie, or come back in a time portal like the Terminator. If you have a thing for this kind of humor, you’re almost never going to stop smiling. If you don’t, these things might just get annoying after a little while.
Missions are also chock full of situational comedy which makes it so that there’s always a good deal of variety, even if there’s a lot of repeating elements like the constant go-from-point-A-to-point-B missions or the ones that have you cutting down hordes of enemies. One mission has you using a directional microphone to find a certain general who’s gone missing, another one has you bringing back a robot dog to its owner, but the only way to get its attention is to use the Kitty Cannon, which is exactly what it sounds like. There are also missions where you have to squash your enemies with a wrecking ball or help some LARPers rescue their king who has fallen ill.
Let chaos reign!
Next to single-player mode, you can check out Chaos Mode, an online co-op multiplayer mode that allows up to eight players to complete missions together. Players compete in a series of rounds culminating in a final round where you have defend a base together at night from waves of enemies. Missions are pretty diverse, and will have you defending certain important points in the city, completing wacky mini-games, or collecting particular items, so things shouldn’t get boring too quickly. The only downside is that there’s no free roaming multiplayer mode like there is in Grand Theft Auto V, for instance.
While playing in co-op mode you use the same character you use in the single-player game, which has the advantage that you get to use all of the customization you’ve made to your character, but the disadvantage that you’ll be left in the dust by more experienced players who are noticeably faster and have much better weapons, meaning beginners will only have a chance of getting into one of the last places. But after a few hours of playing you’ll have amassed a pretty decent arsenal of your own and you’ll have no trouble holding your own against other players. In any event, it’s a ton of fun to play with friends, and you can even play with seven strangers thanks to Xbox Live. You can communicate with one another directly in the game, though sometimes you’ll all be speaking different languages, making it a bit harder to plan things out. Of course, if chaos is really your thing, then you’re definitely in for some of it there.
