Sunset Overdrive is a stylish open-world action game focused on using highly agile movement and silly weapons to fight a variety of foes. You play as a nameless protagonist, a former member of the janitorial staff who manages to barely escape from a horrible horde of people who have been mutated into monsters by drinking an energy drink.
No, seriously.
The game’s core gameplay is very good. The protagonist has the ability to grind along things like power lines and the edges of roofs, bounce high off of cars and dumpsters as if they were springboards, swing around off of poles to get higher, and smash the ground with a ground pound attack then immediately jump for a super jump. Combined with the ability to skate across the surface of water, air dash, and wall run, the protagonist is hyper-agile, and the game exploits this to its fullest. Enemies will spawn in large numbers and swarm you, and if you stand still, you’ll quickly get surrounded and pounded on; by moving around the environment, you both avoid getting hit as well as give yourself more breathing space to aim and fight. All of this naturally encourages you to exploit the movement mechanics to their fullest.
The weapons, too, are fun to use. Unlike all too many third person shooters, this game has an enormous variety of weapons, and they *feel* highly varied. There are some classics – the grenade launcher (reflavored as a launcher that launches teddy bears with explosives strapped to them), a rocket launcher (a rigged-up propane tank launcher), a hand cannon style pistol, a shotgun (with a pair of metal balls on it that definitely aren’t compensating for anything), and an assault rifle. But you also get many strange weapons – deployable sprinklers that spread acid all around them, pistols taped to propellers that float around and shoot nearby foes, a vinyl record launcher that bounces records between enemies, a freeze bomb. There’s even special weapons that are given out on specific missions, like a nuclear powered magical sword and a kitty launcher that summons a robotic dog to tear apart your enemies.
The protagonist also has a crowbar they can use to beat up enemies in melee combat, swing around in a circle while grinding on stuff to clear off nearby enemies, or use to pound the ground.
On top of all this, there’s special amps that you can equip to yourself and to your weapons which add additional effects. Weapon amps add things like random nuclear explosions when you kill enemies, or extra ammo drops, or levelling up your weapons faster (as weapons gain xp in the game by using them more often, and become more powerful as you do so). There are melee amps which add special effects when you attack enemies, mostly in the form of expanding the AoE with some sort of added effect, like setting enemies on fire or pushing them away with wind. There are “epic amps”, which shoot out fire and lighting around you.
All of these amps are activated by building up enough “style” in combat, which is gained by doing special maneuvers (like grinding or wall running) and killing enemies; the more you do these things, the higher your meter gets, and the more of your amps turn on. Standing around or not doing much in the way of special maneuvers will cause the meter to drain, further encouraging the player to keep moving.
This all adds up to a very dynamic combat system, and it is a lot of fun maneuvering around the city and shooting stuff.
Where the game ends up struggling a bit is with repetition. Like most open-world games, the game has a main storyline, as well as some sidequests. Unlike most open-world games, there’s actually relatively few sidequests, and they mostly do something at least quasi-interesting. The game will periodically add in new random mechanics or minigames to try and mix things up, like defending a moving boat or fighting with a unique quest weapon. There are also challenges, which are all minigames, often focusing on platforming or killing a lot of enemies in a short period of time. And this is all well and good.
But the game clocks in around 30 hours long, including all the DLC, but there’s only 14 types of enemies, and none of them are especially threatening. While the game spaces out its new enemies, gradually introducing them over the course of the game, you do end up spending a lot of time throughout the game fighting the same sorts of enemies over and over again. This rapidly becomes kind of trivial; the game doesn’t really have anything to threaten you with but throwing even more enemies at you, but as long as you keep on moving, how many enemies you’re fighting is honestly mostly irrelevant.
The net result is that while the game’s core gameplay is fun, and the game tries to mix things up with weird one-off tasks to do or added mechanics (like LARPers launching catapults at your foes), oftentimes the mixing up of things is just trying to put a bit of window dressing on fighting the same hordes of zombies or dudes with machine guns or robots with laser rifles, and the core gameplay, while enjoyable enough, is also very easy. I felt like the game sort of ran out of interesting things to throw at me at several points, and while it ended up throwing new things at me again, there were several points at which I felt less engaged.
The repetition is furthered by the many, many collectibles in the game, which are not only kind of tedious to collect, but mostly pretty bland and uninteresting; while collecting things like toilet paper and stinky shoes instead of more ostensibly valuable things is kind of amusing, the problem is that almost none of the collectibles are particularly difficult to collect, making it mostly a tedious side-task. And while it does help to familiarize you a bit with the city, it feels like it takes up a bit too much of your time.
The game tries to cover all of this with humor, but it is rather hit and miss. The game’s entire aesthetic is quite excellent, but it is deliberately tacky, and the humor is in much the same vein. The problem is that while this works sometimes – I groaned when I fought the Del Sea Monster in the DLC, and smiled a bit when someone said they were all going to die and the hero pointed out that maybe *they* would die but he’d just respawn right over there – at other times, the humor ends up falling flat. The game heavily relies on “lolrandom” kind of humor, and this is very hit and miss. Moreover, the game is crude in much the same way as a 12 year old boy is crude – they put balls on a shotgun but don’t want to hear about hugging or kissing.
In fact, the game as a whole feels like something that a 12 year old boy with an interest in punk stuff would design a video game to be like, while at the same time, lampshading this fact in various meta ways. This can all come together to be rather amusing, and it is very fun to look at visually, but when the humor falls flat, you can be left sort of feeling like you’re playing something that you probably would have enjoyed a lot more if you were 12.
All this is combined with various 4th wall breaks, some of which work very well, while others are just eye-rolling.
All in all, Sunset Overdrive is a good game, but it isn’t a great one. It’s one of the better open-world action games I’ve played, and the core gameplay is really cool. It has a pretty solid variety of gameplay, and I actually enjoyed the various challenges that pushed me to play the game optimally to get high scores and thus, medals and in-game rewards.
But the game still has a case of open-worlditis, with too much game and too little enemy variety, and some tedious collectibles; even at 30ish hours of gameplay to do everything, it still feels like it is about 10 hours too long.
If you’re a fan of open-world games, this is a great example, and you’ll probably think it is pretty great. And if you want to unleash your inner 12 year old, this game will definitely do that.
But if you don’t like open-world games, this won’t be what changes your mind.
3.0