âI started this game collecting trash,â my character quipped late in Sunset Overdrive, âand now Iâm collecting trash again.â She was defending a makeshift boat that was trying to escape the zombie-infested wasteland of Sunset City. It was a thrilling chase scene. So why were we collecting trash in the middle of it?
Well, see: the boat was really more of a barge, which makes perfect sense, seeing as Sunset Overdrive is a post apocalyptic adventure about the people who survived a cataclysmic event involving a giant evil corporation distributing tainted energy drinks that turned an entire city into bulbous, shrieking pus-filled monsters. Some of these survivors naturally wanted to escape, and do so by any means necessary. Hence the water-bound garbage disposal device that was meant to be our ticket out of there. Once we got moving, however, the infected denizens of Sunset City descended on us with incredible fury. Guns in hand, I leapt feverishly between the barge and the surrounding city streetsâzipping along the corners of buildings and tightly-knit power lines as I did my best to shoot anything that moved. But the swarm of monsters was too dizzying to keep track of, all at once. Neon orange zombies glommed on me whenever my feet touched the ground. Sickly mutants fired ropy strings of greenish acid. Hulking giants and impish bat-like creatures soon followed, all taking aim at our pitiful little vesselâour last hope for escape.
The woman steering the ship cried out for help, saying that the boat couldnât hold much longer and I had to do something. And so, in addition to fending off endless waves of bad guys, I had to bounce around the outermost edges of Sunset City searching for bright green, glowing containers, pick them up, and race back to the barge to deposit them in the vesselâs gullet. Whenever I did this, the boatâs health bar would nudge up again slightly. This gave me a brief reprieve to return to my zombie-killing.
âI started this game collecting trash, and now Iâm collecting trash again.â This passing remark might be surprising, even amusing, if it wasnât the last in a long line of identical cracks. Sunset Overdrive has a remarkable ability to turn practically any moment into an opportunity to make a snide comment about its own video game-ness. Your character is simply known as âPlayerâ (get it?), to give one example, and that moniker is brought up in passing dialogue with other characters very, very often. Whenever âPlayerâ does something that would seem arbitrary or out of place in the real world, a disembodied voice might come in to remind you that youâre not in the real world, because youâre a character inside a video game, doing video game things. Get it? Even the disembodied voice is introduced by making a joke about how game developer surveys have shown that players understand directives best when theyâre delivered by disembodied voices. Get it?
Get it? Sunset Overdrive implores. Eh? Do you get it yet? Ok, you got that oneâŠbut do you get it now? How about now? Eh? EH? See, this time, itâs the Player herself whoâs making the joke. YâknowâŠhealth, green boxes, trash, fetch quests? Itâs funny, right? Because, you know, the character is saying that itâs a video game and everything? Look: sheâs even whining about what youâre doing as youâre making her do it! See, itâs totally breaking the fourth wall!
Only problem is: it was already broken a long, long time ago. Sunset Overdrive first delivered this punchline back in June with an E3 trailer that proclaimed at one point: âItâs a fucking video game!â If only theyâd laid this over-eager humor to rest right then and there:
Instead, there I was on the trash barge: more than ten hours into Sunset Overdrive, and actually having a great deal of fun. Until the game felt the need to once again prod me with a reminder that hey, itâs a video game, so I should totally be having fun.
Thatâs Sunset Overdrive in a nutshell. At every conceivable turn, it tries to give the player a wink and a nudgeâa friendly yet forceful acknowledgement that yes, this is a game, itâs not meant to be taken seriously, and we should all appreciate that so we can ease into its zany bombast. But it delivers this same joke so often, and so zealously, that it becomes less of a knowing wink than a hyperactive, twitchy stare.
As this humor becomes ever more grating, it quickly reveals a lie at the heart of the game. Because no matter how hard Sunset Overdrive tries to dress itself up and chuckle about how lame it is that video games (hey! thatâs what this is!) demand their players indulge in mundane and often meaningless assignments to go to point B, pick up a box, then return to point A, it canât change the fact that the game is telling you to do just that. All these self-aware zingers are just a thin mask intended to conceal an essential failure of the imagination.
And yet, when I got over how annoying it was to hear my otherwise charming protagonist let loose another string of âfucksâ before cracking wise about her place in my video game, I also realized that I was genuinely exhilarated. Those little green boxes added yet another element of challenge to an extended firefight that became increasingly frantic with every passing moment. I remember sprinting towards the last green cube as fast as I could, eyes darting to the shipâs rapidly diminishing health, plunging headfirst into a sea of zombies and chopping at them ferociously to try and clear a path back to the barge. When I couldnât find one, I dove straight into the river and just swam for it. I dropped the trash into the health-deposit-box with mere seconds to spare. As I watched the mission fade into a cutscene, I noticed that my heart was pumping.
Thatâs Sunset Overdrive in a nutshell, too: a series of increasingly frenzied battles set in a bleached-out dreamscape so ornately twisted that it forces you, quite literally, to always think on your feet. Its gameplay carves a deep, particular groove one must learn to fit into for any of it to be fun. But once you find that niche? It can be pretty great.
Stylistically, Itâs A Disaster
Iâm tempted to hold up Sunset Overdrive as the latest in a pantheon of aesthetically and tonally braindead pieces of work that succeed because their gameplay is solid and their off-color humor is charming enough that it doesnât totally gross you out: the Saints Rows, the DmC: Devil May Crys, even the South Park: The Stick of Truths of the world. But even that feels generous: Sunset Overdrive is far more tonally inconsistent, and its gameplay is far less intuitive, than any of those other games.
If Sunset Overdrive has taught me one thing, however, itâs that tonal inconsistency isnât always a flaw. The game is a mess of contradictions, mostly because itâs so tactless in its presentation that it begins hurling shit at you the moment you start playing. Itâs the kind of game that has the brazen stupidity to present you, in that very first moment, with a shotgun that has two hefty metals balls dangling from the bottom of its barrel. Itâs called the âflaming compensator,â and it ejects goopy ropes of bright orange liquid from the other end.
Get it?
And yet, it almost makes up for that whole embarrassment by creating one of the best shotguns Iâve used in a third person shooter in a good long while.
Itâs the kind of game that has a quest arc that contains one passage where you befriend a member of the rock band The Melvins, and another where you must perform a handful of predictable fetch-quests to gain the trust of a group of Hispanic women who all wear skimpy schoolgirl outfits and Day of the Dead makeup. That comes shortly after you sneak into a Japanese history museum, wherein you encounter a troupe of boy scouts decked out in Samurai gear and end up fighting a giant mutant flaming dragon.
Get it?
Itâs horrendously tasteless and backwards at times, but then it drops in a character to cheer you up with the surprisingly progressive message: âWeâre all walking clichĂ©s in somebodyâs eyes!â And whatâs more, it actually follows through on these sorts of statements by offering things like a wonderfully silly and veryâŠopen minded character creator that lets you change your physical appearance, skin color, even your gender, pretty much whenever you want to.
It throws a lot of shit at you, in other words, and not all of it is great. But however shaky Sunset Overdriveâs foundation might appear at times, itâs strong enough that a lot of this stuff manages to stick.
Letâs go back to that very first moment, when youâre handed the magicallyâŠwell-endowed shotgun. Sunset Overdrive begins with you as a low level employee at FizzCo, the aforementioned giant evil corporation, on the evening that its sinister zombifying plan is set in motion. Cans of a new energy drink called âOverCharge Delirium XTâ are distributed at an EDM concert being performed by what looks like a comically fictionalized version of Deadmau5, but one that also serves as a corporate mascot for FizzCo and one of the gameâs chief villains.
Energy drinks, EDM, and adolescent humor: these are the foundations of Sunset Overdriveâs vision, and also a million frat parties across the country. But it doesnât stop there. Because these are the bad guys. Once the energy drinks get into the concert-goers, all hell breaks loose. Oozing bags of snot burst from peopleâs skin, and they start trying to eat you. Everything takes on a sickly orange or bright yellow hue. Sunset Overdrive switches from EDM to an endlessly chugging guitar, one that always sounds vaguely familiar but not quite identifiable. Like a garage band you havenât heard since high school and are having trouble remembering the name of, probably because youâd rather keep it buried somewhere deep in the recesses of your post-adolescent consciousness. The term âshreddingâ comes to mind. Thatâs appropriate, seeing as shortly after Sunset Overdriveâs new soundtrack kicks in, it also tells you to start moving around like youâre playing an old-school skateboarding game. And then it hands you the flaming compensator.
Skateboarding, garage rock, and a penis-shaped shotgun: thatâs the real tone of Sunset Overdrive. Everything in the game is delivered in a confrontational, intentionally grating way, as if its trying to stir up some sense of rebellion. But rebellion against what, exactly? Electronic music and soft drinks? I suppose those are the symbols of bland, corporate-influenced youth culture the game props up as an aesthetic strawman. But it could have come up with a far more clever way to go against the grain than by invoking a handful of cultural referents that are at least a decade past their prime, and do so inside a world that has a visual palette as vibrant and grossly shiny as a slice of pizza.
The Weapons Are Neat, But This Is No Ratchet And Clank
Sunset Overdriveâs irritating aesthetic is particularly disappointing because itâs made by Insomniac Games, a studio thatâs won heaps of well-deserved praise for creating one of the most wonderfully overwrought comic shooter-platformer hybrids out there with Ratchet & Clank. That series might seem tame in comparison to Insomniacâs new game since it always wore its âfamily-friendlyâ badge proudly. But what the studio seems like it has failed to appreciate about its earlier work is that not blurting out âfuckâ after every other word and making guns that look like truck nutz can actually be a useful exercise in creative restraint. What Ratchet & Clank lacked in profanity or edginess, it morethan compensated for with its amazing and always-growing arsenal of weapons that made shooting at bad guys a far more interesting experience than just pointing in the direction of an enemy and pulling the trigger. Now, instead, the compensation we get is the flaming kind.
Sunset Overdrive has plenty of comically oversized killing contraptions you can acquire and modify with upgrades and additions. But these arenât truly weapons in the grand Ratchet & Clank tradition. Many of the guns that seem outlandish, such as one called âThe Dudeâ that shoots giant bowling balls (get it?) or a freeze-ray-type cannon, donât transcend their status as intentionally zany gimmicks. As the game carried on towards its conclusion, I found that I gravitated more and more towards its traditional fareâa revolver, an AK-47, a grenade launcher that shoots explosive teddy bears instead of plain old grenades. The âweirdestâ of my regular lineup were a gun that dropped acid-spewing turrets and another that popped out gun-wielding balloons. Like the teddy bear grenade launcher, these are little more than joke versions of many a shooterâs bread-and-butter arsenal. And as the flaming compensator shows, these jokes arenât always very good.
Sunset Overdriveâs weapons are a lot of fun to useâdonât get me wrong. But viewed in the context of Insomniacâs past work they just feel depressinglyâŠnormal by comparison. Which, again, feels very odd given how hard this new game tries to convince you that itâs out there. I think this points to the core difference between Insomniacâs past work and its new game, however, and the one that leaves the latter coming up very short in comparison. Ratchet and Clank was a lighthearted, joyful romp through outer space as a furry little creature and his equally adorable robot companion. It didnât need to try to be weird. It already was weird. Its colorful assortment of guns was a natural extension of that. They were eccentric in their own way, but the charmingly youthful innocence of Ratchet & Clankâs two main characters placed a protective lid over the whole experience that kept any one disruptive element, like a particularly zany weapon, from spilling over and making a mess of everything.
The deep underlying cynicism at the heart Sunset Overdrive makes any similarly protective measure impossible. Ironically, then, the end result is an inventory of weapons whose sheer adequacy once again reveals a lie at the heart of this game: it wants you to think its not afraid to really go there. To what end, though? A penis-shaped shotgun? Is that a âthereâ we really need to go to? Once you get over the revulsion of playing with a phallic shotgun, you realize itâs still just a shotgun. A remarkably proficient one, sure. But after playing Sunset Overdrive for more than 20 hours, Iâm left with the uneasy realization that its creative repertoire is surprisingly tame, even conservative, in a way Insomniac might not even realize.
Warts And All, The Skateboarding-Like Movement Is A Blast
Thankfully, Sunset Overdriveâs weapons donât exist in isolation. This is still an open-world game, after all. And despite its unusual penchant for toxic, offensively bright neon hues, itâs a pretty intriguing one. Ideally, youâre supposed to spend very little time just hoofing it through the streets of Sunset City. Nearly every surface in the world provides an opportunity to indulge in some delightfully silly acrobatics: rails and edges to grind on, cars and shrubbery plumped up to let you bounce atop them like barely disguised balloonsâif itâs there, itâs meant to be played with. Even the water in the game can be skimmed over as if it was one giant teeming mass of Jell-O. Cavorting around in this space felt like I was given some exclusive invitation to my very own private amusement park.
Like everything else in Sunset Overdrive, the game explains this peculiar form of running-and-gunning by hitting you over the head with constant reminders that you have to jump, dodge, grind, and bounce your way through the world. These come in the form of on-screen text notifications, audible shouts from other characters, and an never-ending barrage of âbadgesâ you unlock just for doing things in the game. Unlike most of the other parts of the game, however, these reminders donât feel quite as overdone, because Sunset Overdriveâs movement is genuinely unprecedented. Getting the hang of it is tricky, but also necessary. If you try to play the game as if it was a more standard third-person shooter like Uncharted or Gears of War, youâll be dead in a matter of seconds. Enemies come at you with insane numbers and zealous force, so standing still or not moving fast enough means that youâll be beset on all sides by zombie-like monsters trying to take big bites out of you in addition to any number of hostile projectiles that will zero in on your general whereabouts. You pretty much have to move about with the speed and agility of an amped-up mosquito just to survive.
It takes time and practice to adjust to the rhythm and pace of never really standing still. Once you do, Sunset Overdrive starts to make a lot more sense. At the beginning of the game, I kept feeling like I was tumbling unceremoniously off the tops of buildings and running face-first into walls. That, or hordes of infected. Within a few hours, however, I felt like I could glide from one end of Sunset City to the other without ever touching the ground. This is a feeling I always wished I had in more traditional superhero adventures like the Infamous and Batman: Arkham gamesâan undercurrent of appreciation for my Playerâs inhuman strength and agility. Moving through the Sunset City stirs up its own sense of viscerally satisfaction, one that Iâm usually only allowed to relish when Iâm killing things in other games. After I put my controller down to write this review, it occurred to me that Iâd barely used the gameâs âfast travelâ feature. It was far more enjoyable to move through the world with an overpowering sense of ease and grace.
I donât know if I actually was that graceful all the time. But the feeling itself is important here. Itâs a stride one must hit before they can actually start to relax and just have fun with the game. Sunset Overdriveâs difficulty curve is smartly unforgiving in this regard, because its more elaborate set pieces and wacky boss-fights require a tolerance for dizzying chaos that I certainly didnât have at the outset of the game.
One of the best battles in the game takes place on a large roller-coaster at the center of a fake castle youâre assaulting with a group of live-action role-playing enthusiasts, for instance. Breaking into the fort is a drag, because itâs one of the moments in the game where itâs hard to find enough railings to grind on in order to move around seamlessly while shooting at the small army trying to keep you out of the makeshift fortress.
Once you crack into the base and start zipping up and down the ever-looping rails of the roller-coaster, however, the level hits its sweet spot. I zoomed back and forth with awesome speed, jumping between different levels of the roller coaster every few seconds to avoid the hordes of infected chasing after me and trying to zero in on the guy who was meant to be my main target. I got lost in the joyful furor of making piles of infected explode with a loud, gooey splat every time I fired an explosive teddy bear into their swarm for a few minutes before I finally summoned up the will and concentration to chase after the flaming roller coaster car in earnest. I chipped away at the car with my revolver until my health would get to low, and then Iâd either reverse direction or jump to another area and try to scrounge up some green cubes. Finally after Iâd done enough damage, the game instructed me to collide with the car headfirst. After another few minutes of almost-nauseating racing around the highs and lows of this veritable cyclone, I connected with the roller-coaster car. The entire screen erupted into a dazzling explosion. All bright orange and charred black. Again, uncomfortably close to the color of pizza.
After finishing that particular episode, I remember getting up from my couch and going to sit somewhere else in my apartment just because I felt I needed a breather. Iâd only booted up my Xbox One maybe 45 minutes beforehand. Thatâs a sign of how exhilarating this game can be, on one level. But I also needed a break because I was hoping that I was done with another of its irritatingly self-aware subplotsâthis one worse than most because it was about a group of LARP-ers, which provided even more opportunities than usual for the gameâs cringe-inducing âHey, itâs a video game!â jokes.
Itâs not that any one line is insufferably terrible (though some certainly are). Rather, whatâs unbearable about Sunset Overdriveâs sense of humor is that it just doesnât know when to fucking stop. There are some moments that are genuinely charming and funny. The way your character comes back from the dead with a handful of quirkily referential respawn animations is particularly adorable, for example. But then, once again, the game almost ruins the whole joke by inserting a passing line at the very end of the game about the fact that itâs making a joke with its clever respawn animations.
Get it?
After hearing jibes like this, I often found myself want to shout at the screen: âOk, ok, I get it: youâre a video game and you know it. Now just be a fucking video game!â
When Sunset Overdrive does ease off its zingers and allows you to relax and enjoy yourself undisturbed, it can actually be a really good game. A great one, even. But it makes you climb over a giant heaping pile of bullshit just to get to that point.
To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq
