Image Courtesy of Insomniac Games
From the minute I started playing, I knew that Sunset Overdrive was going to be one of those games. You know the kind: one so delightfully insane and boundlessly entertaining that you just sit there with a big, stupid grin on your face.
During the countless hours I spent in the game's fictional Sunset City, one thought continuously raced through my mind: "My 10 year-old self would have absolutely LOVED this". Sunset Overdrive's got everything a 90s kid on a sugar-high could possibly want:
Bright colors.
A punk rock aesthetic.
Millions of mutant monsters.
Rapid-fire humor.
A gun that shoots teddy bears.
Oh, and explosions. Lots and lots of explosions.
Coming from Ratchet and Clank developer Insomniac Games, Sunset Overdrive is something that the Xbox One and the new gaming generation desperately needed: a fresh new idea. Video games have been bogged down by realistic shooters and HD remasters so much lately that gamers needed a reminder of just how much fun a video game could be. Sunset Overdrive does exactly that.
The plot is one of the wackiest I've seen in a game in years. It's 2027, and mega-corporation FizzCo has released its new energy drink - OverCharge Delirium XL - to huge success. Problem is, OverCharge has a nasty habit of turning everyone who drinks it into a bloodthirsty mutant. As a result, Sunset City is thrown into chaos, and it's up to your (fully customizable) hero to save the day and the city! Armed with the kind of insane arsenal you'd come to expect from an Insomniac title, you grind, bounce, and wall-ride around Sunset City, obliterating everything that gets in your way.
It would be fair to call Sunset Overdrive the "anti-apocalypse" game, as it offers a wackier, more cartoonish version of the end of the world. Even in the face of certain death, all of the characters constantly crack jokes and break the fourth wall, and have a deep love for murdering countless mutants, human ravagers, and FizzCo robots. Sunset City itself is bursting with color, so much so that it literally pops off of the screen. The design of everything in the game, from the characters to the world itself, is like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. The animation is superb (especially the hilarious respawn animations) and everything moves along at a smooth clip. When enemies explode (and they almost always do), a giant onomatopoeia bursts onto the screen; "POP" and "SQUISH" and "BOOM" cover the screen constantly. Everything is moving so quickly that it's hard to keep up at times; your eyes are going to get a serious workout.
Sunset Overdrive's sense of humor is completely off-the-wall, and I found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion. It takes a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" mentality when it comes to its jokes, and though not all of them hit, it's still one of the funniest games I've played in a while. There's also a ton of fourth-wall breaking; Sunset Overdrive isn't afraid to poke fun at itself and the video game industry in general. Humor is incredibly hard to pull off, especially in a video game, but the game strikes a nice balance corny and genuinely hilarious. I can see how Sunset Overdrive's loud aesthetic could turn some people off, but it never got on my nerves. I enjoyed the humor in Insomniac's other games, and their goofy charm carries over here effortlessly.
Sunset Overdrive's gameplay borrows from a lot of different games, namely Dead Rising, inFamous, and, strangely enough, the Tony Hawk series. In true Insomniac Games fashion, you are outfitted with a ton of over-the-top weapons, as well as a few defensive traps to keep the mutants at bay. In order to stay alive, you need to constantly be on the move, whether that be by grinding on rooftops and power lines, bouncing off of cars, wall running, or, if you're really good, chaining them all together into once awesome display of parkour. While you can move and shoot on the ground, you move incredibly slow and probably won't last very long; this is done intentionally to encourage constant movement. If you chain together different traversal moves with kills, you build up your style meter, which in turn makes you more powerful. You can also assign "amps" (the game's equivalent of power-ups) to your character that alter the power of your weapons and the way you traverse the world.
Missions are structured like most open-world games, meaning you go from point A to point B, shooting things along the way. There are a wealth of side quests, but they mostly involve finding a bunch of hidden items, though some of them deviate from the norm and offer some cool ideas. There's also a ton of collectables scattered around the map for you to find, which all go towards the creation of new amps for you to use. In addition to the single player story, there's an online 8-player co-op mode called Chaos Squad, which tasks you and up to seven friends to complete various missions, all culminating in a horde/tower defense sequence at the end of the night. On paper, the game structure sounds like every other open-world shooter you can think of, but Sunset Overdrive's shooting and traversal mechanics, as well as its crazy humor and colorful aesthetic, make it stand out. Everything about Sunset Overdrive's gameplay - control, shooting, and traversal - gel perfectly, creating a very cohesive, smooth, and insanely addictive gaming experience.
When it comes down to it, Sunset Overdrive is not only the best game available on the Xbox One right now, it's also one of the best games I've played all year. From start to finish, there was not a single thing in it that I didn't enjoy. I can't remember the last time I played a game as rewarding and entertaining as this. I commend Insomniac Games for making the game that they wanted; it has a style and humor that is uniquely its own.
My adoration for Sunset Overdrive comes from the fact that it that reminds me of my days playing games as a kid. It brought me back to a time when games weren't about gritty realism or deep storytelling or innovative gameplay mechanics. Not that those things are bad, but every once in a while, it's nice to give your brain a little vacation and just have fun. And that's what Sunset Overdrive is all about: pure, unadulterated fun. And that's what video games should be all about, right?
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