Sunset Overdrive

For anyone who thought that Resistance was too much of a grim pivot for the people who made Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive will be more in line with expectations. It’s essentially a Ratchet & Clank game mixed with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and, more unfortunately, Borderlands. The main gameplay feature that separates it from other open-world third-person shooters is its protagonist’s inexplicable ability to perform ridiculous traversal maneuvers (rail grinding, wall running, etc.) on the fly. The game wisely plays this up as much as it can – collectibles are each associated with a different movement ability, staying on the move and off the ground is the only way to survive most skirmishes, and all player actions contribute to an ongoing style score that expands combat power and soundtrack intensity as it grows.

The movement mechanics are, without a doubt, the primary reason to play the game. I found smoothly chaining together a series of gravity-defying techniques to be so engaging that I actively avoided using fast travel, even when visiting familiar locations. It strikes a balance of being visually and tactilely impressive while still requiring a certain amount of skill to ensure that it’s not just mindless spectacle. On the other hand, it also doesn’t always work right. Its complexity and freeform nature mean it involves a lot of snapping to the nearest interactive object through context-sensitive input, and the game world is so crowded that you’ll regularly perform unintended actions while trying to do something else that’s assigned to the same button.

In addition to the traversal mechanics, a new array of Insomniac-trademark silly weapons is present, as well as an array of silly traps for use in base defence missions. They are, as usual, quite fun to use, especially while zipping all over the battlefield. They are, also as usual, not balanced in the slightest. The game encourages players to use their favourites regardless of their effectiveness with its low difficulty level, but it goes so far in that direction that most challenge-related enjoyment is sapped away. Specifically, it does the BioShock thing, where dying has you immediately respawn while enemies remain damaged or killed. And on top of that, enemies are more likely to drop health when you’re running low. It’s at least not as stupid as when BioShock did it, because a) Sunset Overdrive isn’t trying to be a horror game, and b) there are a number of missions with goals beyond simple player survival.

With Insomniac, it’s always seemed like the studio itself has ADHD – the parts of game design where you have to sit down and figure out exactly how everything is going to work together are invariably their weakest links. The sandbox structure and large number of primary mechanics in Sunset Overdrive are therefore a good fit for them, since they can fill the map with challenges that exhaust every gameplay possibility. There are still a couple of diversions into unpolished vehicle sections that should have been abandoned at the brainstorming phase, however. The most egregious oversight was how its cooperative multiplayer mode was handled. In its initial Xbox One release, currency and weapon experience were shared between the two modes and balanced with this in mind, meaning if you didn’t play both extensively, the full capability of your arsenal would be locked behind hours of grind. For the PC version, the multiplayer was removed (which was, by most accounts, not much of a loss), but the balancing remained, making the situation even worse.

Usually, the company makes up for this deficiency with ideas and personality, but the personality is kind of annoying this time. In its pursuit of comedy, Sunset Overdrive aims for quantity over quality, with predictable results. I have a high tolerance for this style of writing – I hate that “quip” has become a universal conversation ender for dialogue criticism – but for fuck’s sake, literally every line is trying to be a joke here. It’s not a wholly unfunny game, but even the best comedian in the world would have a miniscule success ratio if they never employed any quality control. One unintentional laugh came from the juxtaposition of a rebellious rock song with the Microsoft logo. But while the game’s corporate-punk aesthetic can be cringeworthy, it’s also bold and eye-catching in a way that committee-designed projects usually aren’t, so I’ll give it a pass.