Sunset Overdrive is an irreverent open-world action game developed by Insomniac before they were purchased by Sony. It was originally released in 2014 for the X Box One, but a PC port came out in 2018, which is the version I've been playing through Game Pass. You play as some poor smuck who ends up in the middle of a mutant apocalypse after a bunch of amped-up concert goers consume an energy beverage called Overcharge. The game has a Warped Tour vibe, with a punk soundtrack and juvenile humor, and a story that's really just background for mutant-bashing. What Sunset Overdrive really excels at is movement. Your character can grind on narrow surfaces, bounce on cars and overhangs, wall-run on the side of buildings, and dash in mid-air. Doing all this generates Style, which is necessary to unlock Overdrives, which are combat and movement upgrades used to upgrade and customize your character. Once you get the hang of movement, just moving your character through the environment is an absolute thrill. Insomniac are great at this; Spider-man is fun just swinging around New York, and you can see a lot of that sort of consideration in Sunset Overdrive. The arsenal is also a hoot. You'll get a rocket launcher that shoots explosive teddy bears; a shotgun that can light mutants on fire; a roman candle missile launcher, and a stun gun that shoots disks that electrocute enemies. Fighting mutants and scabs (your garden variety apocalyptic raider) while bouncing on cop cars like a punked-out Mario is great fun.
The quest design is somewhat repetitive, which is one of my criticisms of the game. You'll encounter various factions, all of which are pretty loony (a group of LARPers who are divorced from reality; a power-hungry boy scout leader), and you'll have to do some busy work for them, which will involve fetching an item while killing mutants. Still, Sunset Overdrive has a good sense of humor, and one of its running gags is that if your character dies, he comes back in some ridiculous way, like in a rocket or out of a portal. Mario-like noises beep when you pick up a health item, and the bouncing sound when jumping off of a car hood is a comical boing.
Performance leaves a little to be desired. Despite being an older game, there's some stuttering as you move around the world, likely due to assets being loaded on the fly. Given that I'm running Sunset Overdrive on a Ryzen 7 5800x, an eight-core CPU leagues beyond the humble X Box One, I'm assuming that the porting process was not perfect. Graphically, it's stylized enough to not look too dated, and you can see the roots of Spider-man in this engine.
Sunset Overdrive reminds me of games like Just Cause. The whole point of gameplay is to have fun moving around the world while causing destruction, and anyone who's a fan of Insomniac's work should definitely check it out. Here are a few screenshots below:
No comments:
Post a Comment