Pretty vacant
Sunset Overdrive is a game that takes traversal -that simple act of making one's way from point A to B- and turns it into a balletic, frenetic roller-coaster ride. Insomniac Games, best known for their Ratchet and Clanks series) has created a Frankenstein's monster of a video game, sewing together Tony Hawk's gameplay, Jet Set Radio's primary-coloured cool, and a smidgen of Dead Rising's off-the-cuff mayhem, to create a sugary shooter-cum-open world game that is great fun - in small doses.
With a narrative aimed squarely at the slacker generation, Sunset Overdrive casts you in the role of a dysfunctional do-nothing whose life gets turned upside when a new energy drink, the titular Overdrive, turns the population of Sunset City into slavering monsters. With this dayglo apocalypse underway, our hero decides to take matters into their own hands and escape Sunset City by grinding, shooting and bouncing their way to freedom.
The focus in Sunset Overdrive is on having fun, and as such the game's storyline is played largely for laughs. Sure, you're surrounded by bombed out cars, broken bodies and legions of deadly monsters, but the aesthetic is more Saturday morning cartoon that dead-serious dystopia. The whole thing looks like a thrash metal album cover come to life, the kind of game Municipal Waste would make with a few million dollars and an army of coders at their disposal. As far as settings go, it is a refreshing change of pace, one that immediately begs to explored.
Sadly, it quickly becomes apparent that there isn't all that much to see in Sunset City; despite the game's strong visual identity it feels indistinct, one district looks much like any other and, as a result, exploration feels unrewarding. For most open world games such a transgression would sour the experience completely, but here it feels like less of an issue, especially as world is intended to feel more like one giant, interconnected skate park than a place where normal human beings would actually live.
In this respect, Insomniac have done a commendable job, littering Sunset City's concrete canyons with a mind boggling number of bouncy objects for players to fling themselves from and rails to grind upon. The team have taken great pains to ensure that players never have to touch the ground if they don't want to, and zipping from one end of the city in an unbroken chain of superhuman jumps, grinds and air-dashes without ever touching terra firma is an unalloyed pleasure.
The controls strike a perfect middle-ground between floatiness and precision; forgiving enough for casual gamers to get to grips with, but with enough depth and scope for experimentation to keep hardcore gamers coming back for more. It's a shame then, that this creativity doesn't extend to the game's generous smattering of story missions, which feel disappointingly generic in comparison. There are fleeting moments of brilliance - one mission has you weaving through obstacles in pursuit of a runaway train - but Insomniac lean a little too heavily on missions that involve fetching items back and forth, or killing wave after wave of enemies.
The game's almost complete lack of difficulty doesn't help matters, either, and many of the weapons in your arsenal (as delightfully unhinged and creative as they are) lack impact, which makes the combat feel curiously flat and unsatisfying. A fatal flaw in a game that calls upon players to shoot their way out of almost every situation.
Ultimately, Sunset Overdrive's preponderance for outdated mission design holds it back from true greatness. As fun as the game's traversal mechanics are, they can't quite disguise the fact underneath all that punk rock swagger, Sunset Overdrive is a little too safe and predictable - more Coldplay than Slayer. Taken what is -an acid-washed open world game with a dash high-flying acrobatics on the side- Sunset Overdrive is a fun enough, at times, great, game, just not quite the revolution we were hoping for.
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