Is ‘Sunset Overdrive’ Worth Playing?
Sunset Overdrive is a game that wanted me to know it’s a game. Through a multitude of fourth-wall breaks, Sunset Overdrive establishes its world as one that doesn’t care how it got me to the action, just that I’ll be blasting hordes of enemies while grinding and bouncing around the environment. Sometimes the story didn’t make much sense and sent me on wild goose chases for no reason, but it’s all in the hopes of making a game. I don’t mind that particular aspect, and actually really enjoyed the little jokes and references strewn throughout. Every time I died, a respawn animation existed that came from a variety of classic films – one such animation involved a DeLorean from Back to the Future. Little quips from the player character about each event were always good for a laugh. Even if the other areas of this game were a bit lacking, the humor definitely makes up for it. Sunset Overdrive is worth playing.
The actual story of Sunset Overdrive is relatively simple. A corporation released a new drink that caused the consumers to turn into monsters, and suddenly the city is an apocalyptic wasteland. The company seals off the city from the rest of the world, so little factions form up and have their own little problems. I particularly enjoyed the LARPer faction and how they managed to hold their own against the multitude of monsters and firearms. Even so, I never felt any strong attachment to any of the characters.
There’s always chatter during missions, but none of it ever felt meaningful beyond constantly telling me that I should be going somewhere that I’m already going to, or about how one character really likes another character. It’s been established that the player character doesn’t care about these other factions, but then at the three-quarters mark, he turns around and decides to help everyone out of the goodness of his own heart. It makes no sense, but Sunset Overdrive doesn’t care as long as it has an excuse to have a big finale. While it was a fairly satisfying finish with a neat Donkey Kong Country-like fourth-wall twist involving early credits, it wasn’t enough to keep me playing through the post-game content.
Sunset Overdrive’s gameplay was an okay mix of Ratchet and Clank’s guns and an open-world exploration like Spider-Man (PS4), both of which also happen to be developed by Insomniac. Hordes of enemies appear in every mission, forcing a sort of run ‘n gun style to avoid getting overwhelmed. To help with movement, Sunset Overdrive includes rail grinding and bounce mechanics, both of which I had to use the full extent of constantly. It became fairly difficult to focus on aiming and movement simultaneously, thus by the end of the game I tended to take a single grind rail around in circles until all of the enemies around me were defeated, despite the game’s encouragement through a ‘style’ mechanic.
The gun upgrade system feels like a duplicate of Ratchet & Clank’s one, in that using weapons more makes them stronger. The catch is that weapons have a limit on how strong they get, so I was encouraged to use weaker weapons to avoid wasting experience points while enemies were getting stronger. By the end of the game, I decided to stop trying to upgrade new weapons and focus on the few I had that were useful. It also felt like very few of the weapons I could buy were very unique. They looked cool, like a gun that shoots records, but functionally weren’t different from the ones I was given automatically as the story progressed. Nothing else I ever obtained felt as good as the grenade launcher.
