Sunset Overdrive - Review

Sunset Overdrive is a completely zany over the top game that stars you. Yep, you and as a survivor of the apocalypse, you are finally able to unleash your potential, however does this action shooter from the makers of Ratchet and Clank live up to the hype, or is it all a big marketing stunt?

Fizzco is releasing a brand new energy drink, Overcharge onto the world but to celebrate they are letting their home town of Sunset City taste it first. At the launch event, you are working as a cleaner and while taking a break you saw the world come to an end. From this point you have the chance to become something more than you were, if you are awesome enough to do it.

Sunset Overdrive is all about movement, in fact walking on foot is perhaps the most dangerous thing you can possibly do and that is considering some of the bosses you need to fight. Your character seems to have almost Ninja like reflexes and you need to learn how to use them to survive, which thankfully is really simple. You simply need to know two things really, jump and grind/wall run once you get those two things down you are almost there. Jumping is exactly as it sounds, you jump from car roofs to the power lines and then you grind along them and if you need to, you can then jump to a building and wall run around it until you can jump off and grind some more. After a few minutes of this you should feel pretty comfortable in moving around, because you are going to jump head first into everything.

After you’re shown the ropes, or power lines you are shown how amps work and they are critical to your survival. Amps give you boosts in everything you can do, but they only activate once your style hits set levels and in order to boost your style up, you need to be stylish. In order to be stylish you simply need to move around the world by grinding, wall running, bouncing, air dashing and such and the more of these you do back to back the bigger your combo and style gauges will get. The amps that you can get will allow you to modify your weapons, health and even movement boosts, which can all come in very handy when fighting swarms of enemies.

But amps are not the only cool thing you can get, you can also purchase badges which have an impact regardless of your style level. In fact the way to earn badges is dependent on how you play, if you are someone who avoids fighting scabs, unless on mission you won’t earn many badges for killing them, but if you do then you can earn some perks when fighting them. The same is said for almost everything else, should you grind everywhere, you can unlock perks that allow you to grind faster, so the game really does reward you for how you play. Thankfully collecting badges is simple unlike the amp process.

Scattered around the city are various items used by Floyd to create amps, shoes hanging on power lines, security cameras, neon signs and such, but in order to create more amps, Floyd needs to use Overcharge. This can also only be done at night due to UV rays hitting the Overcharge and science stuff, what it boils down to is a mini tower defence style game where you need to protect the vats that are making your new amps from massive amounts of OD that want that Overcharge drink. The problem with this part of the game is it’s not as fun as the rest of the game and breaks the flow, in fact whenever those missions popped up in the main quest line I shuddered. They are not bad by any means, but they are just not fun.

What is fun though is the weapons, Insomniac have always had a talent for designing some of the best video game weapons and here they have really outdone themselves. Each of the weapons the game has on offer will offer up a rating on how well they perform on certain enemies, fire works really well on OD but not so much on robots, so you will need to fill out your weapons wheel with a variety, to ensure you can take on all the bad guys. The problem that I had with the weapons is that I never really left the first few I picked up, sure The Dude, was awesome, I mean who would not want to hurl bowling balls around, but its slow charge rate meant it was only good if you had space between you and the enemies you were firing at.

As you complete missions, both main and side you earn cash that you can use to purchase new weapons, but I think the only reason I bought more weapons was to spend the cash I was earning. The other reason to spend cash is to customise your wardrobe, a key aspect to surviving the apocalypse is to look good while doing it. To begin with I started out with a very normal looking outfit, but towards the end I was rocking Samurai pants and sandals with a medieval themed hoodie and the best part is that all the cutscenes show off your style correctly. Each of the clothing types comes with a series of choices in terms of colours and looks but they all fall into the one category, you just need to choose the one you want.

Each of the citizens of Sunset City who have not been turned into hideous monsters or scabs all have looks of their own, with the geeks and LARPers all fitting the roles exactly, but when you get to the cheerleaders, well they had no set style to follow so the craziness of their appearance suits the game perfectly. Each of the locations that you can base out of and the other factions bases are all designed really well, the geeks for example take over an old children’s party house, token animatronic band included, the place feels like it could exist in the real world, in fact if the game had smell-o-vision then I am sure old pizza would be oozing from that place.

The other locations are equally as impressive, but they pale in comparison to the city itself, which is to say the city is awesome. IF the apocalypse had not happened, I am sure a major skating event would have been hosted in the city, it is primed for that from the get go. The city also has a massive rock scene, which helps cement the music you hear throughout it as well, except of course for a single mission where you character requests something a little more relevant. In fact your character and the others are able to interact with the world as if they knew it was all a video game, very early on when you meet Buck National, there is a breaking of the forth wall that had me in stitches. Each time I thought was predicting the course the game would take, it just went and took a turn that I never thought possible.

The game also includes a multiplayer mode, known as Chaos Squad and it can be accessed from inside the games single player elements, here you and at least one other player or seven more can take on increasingly harder missions that will grant you bigger rewards, I was not able to take part in this prior to the review, but it does sound intriguing.

Overall, Sunset Overdrive is a game that takes the notion of what games need to be and ignores it and creates something new. The city has a depth to it that most fail to achieve, weapons and characters are original in both design and execution but the best part is, the game is just flat out fun to play. If you own an Xbox One, you owe it to yourself, or at least the kid inside of you to get this game.

The Score

9.0

Review code provided by Xbox Game Studios

The Pros

+The gameplay is utter fun and will keep you bouncing all day long

+Characters are quirky and funny, just the kind one needs at the end of days

The Cons

-There isn't a lot to do outside of missions in this open world

-Random slow missions break the pacing of the experience