Sunset Overdrive was released in 2014 as an Xbox One exclusive and was heavily promoted by Xbox. Developed by Insomniac, which brought us the fantastic Spyro and Ratchet and Clank series, there were high hopes, did they succeed?
Set in the year 2027, in the fictional city, Sunset City. A company called FizzCo, released an energy drink, Overcharge, that turned drinkers into mutants, referred to as 'OD'. The player can grind on rails and phone wires to traverse quickly, as well as jumping and bouncing on cars and other things and wall run and air dash too. You are not meant to walk around here, if you're in a fight and aren't grinding and jumping, you won't last long.
You are treated to a a giant map, seeing as you can't drive you are able to fast travel, but grinding around is pretty fun you may not want to. The colours stand out, it's really colourful and bright, it looks beautiful and brand spanking new! The graphics are excellent, they're really cartoony, but there's lots of detail in all the characters. The voice acting is brilliant and the dialogue is hilarious, practically everything our character said had me in stitches. The customization is excellent too, you get full control over your character, with many clothing and other items to help you be who you want.
There is a huge arsenal of weapons, there's some really great and unique weapons, each weapon can be levelled up and becomes more powerful the more you use them. You able to have a few equipped at once and are able to have a nice variety of weapons. As well as guns, you have melee too. There's a few different melee weapons, but they work the same really. There are also amps that are sort of power-ups, there's so many to choose from you'll very likely find suitable ones to equip. There is also a few factions throughout the story leading to different kinds of allies and some funny characters.
The story is fun and a really good length, there's a bunch of side missions and a lot are fun. To add to this game that's packed with content, there's challenges, waves of enemies and even online. The online is called Chaos Squad and let's you play with a few other players and you can unlock content for your single-player. Together you do mini-missions that all lead to a night defense, where you protect your Overcharge from hordes of OD.
This is one of the funniest, craziest, funnest, beautiful looking games I've ever played, this game is unique. One of my favourite parts was a roller-coaster boss fight, you can grind along a roller-coaster track, while attacking enemies and chasing after a cart. This is jam-packed with easter eggs and references, the revive animations are great and hilarious, you can be dropped off from Doc's DeLorean or crawl out of a TV just like The Ring movie.
One other thing I love about this game, is that it knows it's a game. It has constant fourth wall breaking and the playable character often talks to the player themselves. At one part, the combo bar that is always in the corner of your screen is picked up by the character and he uses it as a weapon on a boss, I couldn't believe it, I loved it. There is even a physical 'invisible wall', it's a holographic wall with the words "invisible wall" printed on. There's even a side mission where you have to collect 'side mission icons', a woman in the game rents out her icons that indicate the person who has one floating on their head has a side mission and they never gave her them back, it's full of unique and funny stuff like that.
Honestly, there's not much I didn't like here. If I'm gnit picking then I'd say there was no health regeneration, you could only use health pick-ups which lead to a lot of dying. I have to mention that I wasn't a big fan of the combat at first, having to jump and grind around, but that's how the game is played. You have to adapt to it and once I did, I absolutely loved it.
There's a couple DLC packs for this one, but after playing through this, I don't just want DLC, I want a sequel...NOW. Continue the great work Insomniac and please keep this series coming.
8.5/10
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