Combat tries to deepen itself through the use of weapon modifications and unique abilities, but it seldom goes beyond just bouncing around small arenas and unleashing a continuous stream of fire until everything around you drops dead. All these years later it pulls that off, and it’s still damn good fun. It’s simple for a reason, and wants to fulfil an unrealistic power fantasy of a foul-mouthed millennial causing chaos amidst the apocalypse. This is an especially prescient decision given combat encounters can make following the action hard enough anyway, let alone if you dare to throw a scoring system and more nuanced parkour into the mix. You aren’t asked to maintain balance or perform combos to stay above ground, with the game understanding that removing obstacles from player movement only serves to make the experience more enjoyable. I’ve heard complaints in the past about how movement in Sunset Overdrive has no consequence. Human and monster enemies roam the streets, but getting away from them is trivial enough that their presence never feels like a barrier for discovering this world on your own terms. Stinky shoes, stray toilet paper, neon signs, and floating balloons are scattered across the environment like agility orbs in Crackdown, providing decent enough incentive to explore and hone your parkour skills outside of story missions. After going through a handful of obnoxious tutorials, you’re given relative freedom to explore. Sunset City is a dense, simple playground that exhibits many of the same hallmarks of similar open worlds today. A bummer, given this game is Insomniac Games at its wackiest and most inventive, with so many of its hallmarks being carried over to Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Microsoft would go on to cancel similar exclusives with personalities like Phantom Dust, Scalebound, and Fable Legends - meaning Forza, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Gears 4 followed in the footsteps of Sunset Overdrive with almost none of its infectious charm. It isn’t clever or satirical, not really, but it establishes a strong enough foundation with ample character and plenty of opportunities to just have fun at the expense of nobody, and even today there are so few games in the blockbuster space willing to do such a thing. I dabbled with it back in the day, but now I’m jumping in for realsies. Love my family, but this article isn’t about them, it’s about a lovable little gem called Sunset Overdrive that I’m finally getting around to playing after all these years. I then had to lug that bastard and all my other belongings across the country on a train journey because my parents weren’t willing to give me a lift back to campus.
It’s been almost eight years since the game came out, and I remember getting an Xbox One bundle with a white console and digital download of the zany open world adventure for Christmas mere months after I started university.
Even ahead of release, fans were enraptured by its colourful tone in a market filled with bland shooters and predictable blockbusters. Whenever Insomniac Games’ Xbox One exclusive is brought up in conversation a bunch of people will jump in to defend it - showering praise upon its creative parkour, fast-paced combat, and batshit humour that never once tries to take itself seriously.
Sunset Overdrive is a beloved little gem.
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