Sunset Overdrive Review

Sunset Overdrive is a game that I first played over at a friend's house. I don't recall seeing the game much before that point, so I never had the opportunity to grow interested in the game. Thus, it flew under my radar almost entirely. My friend let me play around on his finished save for a few minutes, and it gave me nearly a full idea of what the game is like. I liked it, but I basically forgot the game existed later. Four years later, I got the opportunity to play Sunset Overdrive for myself in full, and I loved every minute of it. The fact that I had played the gist of the game before didn't matter; the game is enjoyable enough to not need to be anything more complex than what you could experience in twenty minutes.

Sunset Overdrive's gameplay reminds me a lot of the classic Doom games. Both are shooters that are mastered not by improving your aim but more so your ability to dodge everything coming at you. In Doom I and II, there was no way to aim up or down, so you only had to focus on left and right aiming to shoot anything. In addition, the fast movement speed of the player character encouraged to move around a lot to avoid enemies and their projectiles. Sunset Overdrive is rather similar. It's main mechanic is that just about everything around you can be used to either bounce or grind on, which is highly encouraged for several reasons. First of all, the game is filled with zombie-like monsters known as "OD," who will quickly swarm you if you're just walking around like a normal person. Second, moving around a lot helps you avoid attacks from tougher enemies, which saves you from taking lots of damage that you likely would've taken if you were just simply walking. Third, there is a "Style" mechanic present which fills up when performing locomotive actions like grind and deteriorates when walking.

Style is a rather important mechanic in and of itself. Building Style up to certain levels activates different passives known as "Amps" for the player and their weapons. At level one, Hero Amps activate, granting the player two passive effects. At level two, Weapon Amps activate for all of the player's guns and their melee attacks. At level three, Epic Amps unlock, unleashing more powerful passives for the player. Finally, at level four, all Amps increase in damage for a limited time. Building Style up to levels three and four requires the player to do an equal amount of moving and killing. Grinding on the same rail for too long or bouncing on the same object won't be enough; moving between objects is key. In essence, building Style is a win-win situation. It helps to both avoid damage from enemies and deal more damage yourself.

Now, you might think that with all this moving around, it can be hard to hit enemies since you're moving around them and have to compensate for such, but that's not entirely the case. Sunset Overdrive has a sort of auto-aim system that locks on to an enemy so long as your sights are close enough, making it so that you don't necessarily have to aim right at your target. This might make the game sound too easy, but it certainly isn't. It can still be rather tricky to hit targets while moving around; the auto-aim is a much needed asset, but it is by no means a crutch. Whether intentionally or not, the game's art style also makes the gameplay smoother. Everything from scenery to enemies is bright and colorful, which makes it easy to spot the next thing to bounce on or grind off of to keep your Style built up, and, at least in the case of OD, makes it easy to set your sights on your next target.

While Sunset Overdrive does fall into some sandbox game tropes, the game does them well enough to where they don't bring down the experience. Collectibles, for example, are the usual random junk scattered about the world - quite literally, in this case - but they're in places that you're likely to run into anyway from just casually running around the city. The game does have a fast-travel system, but I never used it in my playthough simply because of how fun it is to run around the city. Along the way, I frequently ran into collectibles; at a higher rate than any other sandbox game I've played, I might add. I can't imagine it's too much of a pain to go for 100% completion because, like I said, it's simply fun to run around the city.

There were certainly trope-ish missions throughout the game's story mode, such as escort missions, collect X amount of Y missions, and so on, but they were all done in a way where they were never boring slogs like they normally are in other games. Sunset Overdrive's gameplay in tandem with its self-awareness and silly writing. Even if I was going on my millionth "collect X amount of Y" mission, the game would give me a silly enough reason for it to not hate its inclusion, and there would be surprises along the way to make it more than just another "collect X amount of Y" mission. On top of that, missions were always forgiving enough to not force me to repeat them over and over again to progress, and they never went on for longer than they needed to.

Looking at is as a whole, Sunset Overdrive's only flaw is being perhaps too simple and too trope-ish. That said, I personally did not take any issue with this because of how much fun I had playing through the game. Sunset Overdrive gets a 5 out of 5. In my eyes, the game doesn't do anything wrong enough to bring down everything it does right.

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https://insomniac.games/game/sunset-overdrive/