When you stand back and take a look at the games industry its a pretty morbid place. Full of greedy moneymaking schemes, depressing games focussed on the aspect of realism and unfinished glitchy products being sold off at ever increasing prices. However there have always been those developers that shine a light of fun and frivolity over the industry, that remind us why we game in the first place and Insomniac Games is one such developer.
After their last new IP, Fuse, was a rather large and unexpected flop for the talented developers; their latest venture sees them partner exclusively with Microsoft (a little strange seeing as they were loyal to Sony for so long, creating the likes of Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank and the Resistance games).
God I'm only two paragraphs into this review and I feel like its just some regurgitated, stale, lifeless garbage. Its a good thing I have been playing Sunset Overdrive for the past...11 hours...otherwise I would have thought that this review started off well! It needs more colour, it needs more explosions! Where the hell is Insomniac when you need them?
Welcome to Sunset City, you play as you, thank god for that otherwise we might have had a little trouble on our hands. You worked as a garbage collector for the mega soft drinks corporation FizzCo until their latest energy drink, Overcharge, turned the inhabitants of Sunset City who drank it into horrifying, vicious and rather disgusting mutants. When the city got infected, FizzCo quarantined the city claiming it had a virus in an attempt to protect their stocks. What's your job now you ask? To get out of the city by any means possible you fool! Along the way you'll meet a range of characters such as the Oxfords (Rich kids who have been left on their own since the outbreak), Troop Bushido (A group of scouts with a serious leadership problem), the Fargarths (A group of middle aged fantasy role players) and Las Catrinas (A group of Puerto-Rican cheerleaders who care for sick children in the hospital).
Sunset Overdrive takes a comedic and light hearted look at the apocalypse rather than a grim and gritty one, something very different from what we are normally offered.
Having said this the story is the games weakest point. It lacks focus and drive, the characters are never explored and are simply cardboard cut-outs of personality stereotypes and none of your actions have any weight as the game simply exists to mock itself and typical videogame cliches. Its not a bad story, in fact actually its rather entertaining, but in a simple kind of way, in the kind of way you find Michael Bay films entertaining; not because they have a deep philosophical, social or political message, but because explosions...and that's pretty much Sunset Overdrive.
Sunset Overdrive's gameplay is kind of hard to pin down so bear with me here. Its a 3rd person action adventure, with a strong emphasis on shooting and an even heavier emphasis on fluid movement and scaling the environment to your advantage.
The basic structure of missions in Overdrive has the story mission always set to active and requires you to just move to the waypoint to trigger the next objective. In between these waypoints you are free to explore the city and take part in secondary activities as you please. Whether this be side missions to earn more cash, items or weapons or score based minigames that will place you on a world ranking leaderboard.
Movement is key in Sunset Overdrive, if you don't use the environment you will die and very very quickly at that. Thanks to the cartoony aesthetic of Overdrive, you are able to jump very high and defy the laws of physics in various ways such as being able to infinitely run along walls and use almost any surface as a springboard to gain even more height in jumps. You can grind on rails, boost through the air, surf on the surface of the water using sheer momentum and swing on horizontal poles alongside many other fluid and stunning manoeuvres to help you traverse the environment.
