Sunset Overdrive: Welcome to the Awesomepocalypse

                                           COURTESY PHOTO / GAMESPOT.COM

Sunset Overdrive is, without a doubt, one of the craziest, most action-packed, wise-crack-filled games to come out in quite a while. It doesn’t waste any time trying to take itself too seriously, a breath of fresh air from some of the dark, gritty games that have been coming out lately.

Overdrive opens with a huge party. The company, Fizzco, has just released their new energy drink, OverCharge, to a small group of people as a promotion for when they launch nationally. The main character is tasked with being a janitor at the party, picking up cans, cleaning stuff up, a real dead-end job. Everything is going normally until one of the partygoers grotesquely transforms into a disfigured mutant, who are later known as the OD, short for Overcharge Drinkers. Fizzco didn’t test their product very well, and now their drink is turning everyone into mutants.

The main character narrowly escapes with his life, but rather than being upset or depressed, he's pretty happy. No more working, no responsibilities, no rules. Every single mission, story related or otherwise, is always over-the-top action, hysterical dialogue, and pop-culture reference packed. Not to mention the fact that the game is constantly breaking the fourth wall in the best way possible. Insomniac Games didn’t pull any punches when they were making Sunset Overdrive, they wanted everyone to know that this game is freaking awesome, and they delivered. Sunset City is big, colorful, vibrant, and full of life, with a huge array of weapons and add-ons in the form of “amps”, and an endless supply of enemies. There’s never a dull moment even when just moving between mission objectives.

Now, Sunset Overdrive’s gameplay is a little different from some shooters because it focuses greatly on movement and style. Everything in the game can either be swung, grinded, or bounced on. The character can run along walls, and boost through the air, but don’t stop moving, because that’s when the character is the most vulnerable and weak. A style meter will constantly fill the more the character grinds and bounces on objects, and when segments of that meter fill, different amps will activate.

Different types of amps include melee upgrades, which result in things like having fireballs or tornadoes shoot out of the weapon when swung and other such ridiculous things. Weapon amps can be equipped to different weapons to apply effects such as bullets being electrified, exploding ammo, and a 1/1000 chance that a bullet will be a miniature nuke. The player can also unlock style amps that affect bouncing and grinding, like causing a giant explosion on everything you bounce on, flares shooting off while the character grinds, and lightning striking with every bounce.

Simply running on the ground and pumping bullets into enemies won’t get players very far. While that doesn’t sound very fun, Insomniac actually makes dying in Sunset Overdrive fun (and funny). Whenever the character respawns, he doesn’t simply reappear, no, he might get dropped off by an alien saucer, come through a magical telephone booth, or even use a portal gun from the Portal games to make an appearance. It never gets old. 

Chaos Squad, the game’s 8-player co-op multiplayer, is just as fun as the single-player campaign. 8 players work their way through various missions, racking up chaos points, culminating in a final night defense, where players set traps and work together to defend their base from waves of enemies. It gets pretty crazy having 8 people bouncing around and flipping everywhere launching exploding teddy bears, bowling balls, and freeze bombs into hordes of mutants. Players can also unlock new amps and weapons in this mode to bring back to your single-player game, so there’s plenty of incentive to mix it up between single and multiplayer modes.

Sunset Overdrive is an awesome game that really doesn’t have much in terms of negatives. The game runs smooth, the controls are great, traversing the environment in style doesn’t take long to get used to, and blowing up groups of enemies with exploding teddy bears never gets old, either. The story is fun to get into, the characters are memorable, especially your own. The dialogue is pure comedy gold, and there’s plenty of extra missions and collectibles to keep to entertainment going for quite a while. Sunset Overdrive may be a tad repetitive in some mission types, but as long as there are bad guys to kill, it can usually be overlooked because this game is just way too fun.