Sunset Overdrive is an action adventure third-person shooter by Insomniac, most well known for their Ratchet & Clank games. You can see some of that influence here, especially the weaponry options. The game takes place in Sunset City, and you control a character that you can customize the appearance of. Although there aren’t too many customization options in the beginning, it’s enough to create a unique character. The character is a normal person but then while working, he witnesses the beginning of the “awesomepocalypse”, where people were turning into mutants (i.e. zombies) due to drinking a new energy drink.
The mutants have overrun the city, and the city has been cordoned off as a result to quarantine the disaster. The character manages to find others who has not turned yet and together they team up to try and find a way out of this mess. The game leans towards the sillier side and cracks a lot of jokes. It often breaks the fourth wall and the character designs are very stylized. Thankfully, that humor works well, and it suits the cartoony cel-shaded look of the game. You have to take note that the game was released at the start of the Xbox One generation, so the graphics, particularly the character models, aren’t that much better than the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation.
The biggest differentiator of this game is the traversal system. The character defies physics and can grind on anything and everything. They can jump really high from bouncing on vehicles or the roof fan exhausts. The developer has tried to make it easy with plenty of these grinding and jumping spots all over the place, so that you can easily make it to your destination without ever touching the ground. It can be a bit rough in the beginning though when you accidentally drop to the ground and need to find a way back up.
The traversal may be awkward at first but once you play around for a bit and realise what you can do, as well as the game unlocking a few more abilities as you progress, then you can easily continue your grinding or jump and it becomes very fluid. The same goes for the combat, once you get a few more weapons and options, it’s a lot of fun changing weapons and then blasting the enemies. That said, you might still die from time to time because you got caught in a bad place the checkpoints are generous and you don’t have to repeat much at all.
Keeping off the ground is important due to the mutants roaming around the city. They do heavy damage, and the best way is to keep moving by grinding above them while shooting at them with your weapons. This definitely takes some getting used to as at first, you’ll be moving too fast to aim properly. You can slow time down a bit by zooming and aiming but it still ends up being a tad bit too chaotic. The game loves to throw hoards of mutants at you at once, so it’s impressive with the sheer numbers, but can make the game a little bit harder. You also need to constantly be on the move as you’ll charge up a Style Meter which is used to unlock additional effects of your weapons and other equipped items.
You can use a variety of weapons, that looks weird, and is named weird. It’s a trademark of the Ratchet & Clank series, and it feels lifted straight out of those games. The weapon wheel that you can pull up, the way that you can level up weapons with usage, being able to install “amps” (aka mods) onto those weapons and their wacky effects, it’s probably one of the best parts of the game. Weapons have limited ammo which you replenish by defeating enemies or breaking open ammo boxes, they don’t require reloading though.
The mission design is surprisingly varied. Open world games tend to recycle the same types of mission objectives, and while the game doesn’t reinvent anything, each mission is much more than “go to this place and kill all the enemies”. There’s the usual objectives like platforming, but also some more unusual ones like leading a deadly robotic dog or flying a vehicle. However, because of this variedness, you might be doing something that you don’t normally do and so you’ll have to get a hang of the controls instantly or you’ll die and go back to the previous checkpoint. Later enemies do really heavy damage, which is extremely annoying when the character does not have any good blocks or dodge abilities. It’s already hard enough aiming while constantly on the move, but when they keep firing projectiles that basically track you and does massive damage, with multiple of these enemies, it can turn into a frustrating experience. This is when you must take note of how each weapon is strong against particular enemies.
The story takes you from one area of Sunset City to the next, as you meet one group and help with their plight. It’s a reciprocal thing as they usually have something that is needed for the character to further their progress to escape the city. Once that is done, they then move onto the next group, so the structure can be quite predictable on that part. Th story is quite short, taking around 7 hours to complete. Of course, there are plenty of side missions, but those are nowhere near as fun and funny as the main campaign. The ending was a bit iffy in terms of leaving things as status quo. While it’s cool to see all the characters band together and fight against an epic boss, the boss was big but that was it. It was actually anticlimactic given how easy it was, there were normal enemies that were tougher. The short story mode also means it’s easy to not be able to experience all the weapons before you’ve finished it.
The PC version includes the two DLCs, the first of which is The Mystery of the Mooil Rig which adds in a new area, and has the character investigate the missing sister of one of the side characters. It introduces palette swaps of normal enemies and a big new boss. The second DLC is Dawn of the Rise of the Fallen Machines, and adds the same type of content, with a new area and palette swaps of enemies. This time the character explores a Fizzco robot factory. For both, it’s mostly more of the same, but adds maybe one or two new types of gameplay in the missions. However, both are more unforgiving in its design so you’ll probably fail missions a bit more than the normal story. It’s still quite easy to pass but can be frustratingly unfair when you have to retry.
Overall, Sunset Overdrive is a fun and chaotic yet smooth and stylish game. In many ways, it is similar to Ratchet & Clank from the same developer with its focus on crazy weapons and platforming. However, the parkour system chains together really nicely, and it makes traversing the map a lot of fun, something that is boring in a lot of other open world games. The writing is excellent with the biggest negative of the game being the short main story but is somewhat mitigated with the inclusion of both DLCs.
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