E3 2014 - Sunset Overdrive Hands On

            

At an E3 preview event of Xbox, I was able to spend some time playing Sunset Overdrive, the game that I was probably most worried about leading into E3.

Well put those thoughts to rest, because Sunset Overdrive is a blast. What concerned me about Sunset Overdrive was how easy it would be to move about, I mean you watch the stage demo that Ted Price did and you see him grinding, swinging and bouncing all over the place with almost no pauses. Thankfully the team at Insomniac knew that in order to make the game fun, the movement had to be simple and fluid and boy did they deliver.

When you want to grind a rail, you just press X, when you want to use your crowbar to hang from a rope, just press X. See X is your friend, sure killing things is cool but it’s how you move about the world that makes this game even cooler. Movement is key in Sunset Overdrive because the more crazy moves you pull off the crazier your weapons will be. In the demo that I was able to play, I had to make my way over the other side of an amusement park and destroy some weapon caches. Sounds simple enough I thought, well I have been wrong before.

I spent the first few mins of the demo learning how to move; thankfully I had a dev from Insomniac Games close by to provide help. Once I was able to master the movement, I then set my sights on taking out the monsters nearby. At first I just ran around and started shooting them, but then I started to throw cans of Overcharge, the energy drink that causes them to appear, the monsters are drawn to the cans, which results in a lot in a small space, perfect for racking up the kills. Littered throughout the environment are items that can be shot, bounced on, hit or triggered to cause environmental kills. The best I found were the balloon stalls that when shot would cause a massive explosion.

But I had a mission to do, so after some time I started towards the rollercoaster and as I neared the start of the pier a Herker appeared. The Herker is a large creature that seems to have absorbed some heavy lifting machinery, which means its capable of throwing large objects at you. Under the instructions of the Dev, I lured the creature to the strong man test, which had been outfitted with a Jacob’s ladder style contraption, this when triggered shocked the Herker so I was able to do some serious damage to it. Thankfully, after a few deaths, I was able to take it down which resulted in a giant and awesome PoP appearing on the screen.

Once that was done, I finally made it to the rollercoaster where I had to destroy the towers at each end and then defeat the boss, all while dodging more monsters and the runaway coaster cars on the tracks.

My time with Sunset Overdrive was short but man was it fun, the biggest worry was how easy it would be to move around and it turns out it was an unfounded worry. My main concern now though is that I have to wait months before I can play it again.