Can you blame us for dishing out a Fanatical Five about one of the biggest, prettiest and hugely anticipated title that Insomniac Games is releasing at this month’s end? Sunset Overdrive has been such a joy to explore and thrilling to learn about for the last few months, so us writers and editors at The Game Fanatics decided knock our heads together and do a run-down of all our favorite things about Sunset City, the mutants and how awesome it is to be your own superhero while disposing of them with explosive teddy bears. Ridiculous? Yes. Cool? Very.
You can be what you wanna, brotha!
Insomniac wants to separate from the pack from the usual open-world video game and truly give players the ultimate sense of freedom. There are an eclectic and vibrant tastes to be had when choosing how players want their virtual representation of themselves to look, or how their friends look or a completely different persona altogether. All of that has been thrust into Sunset Overdrive thanks to Art Director and Character Artists Galvin Goulden and Jacinda Chew, who came together worldly fashion styles mixed with left-field culture items.
This mostly means that I can now control a schoolgirl wearing a luchador mask, some killer headphones and rocking a metal jacket. Either that or I can switch to a character who looks like me: jeans, t-shirt, some sweet kicks and maybe a baseball bat.
The character customization in Sunset Overdrive offers limitless combinations of accessories and clothing. With no real RPG attributes to hinder player experience, these duds are sure to help gamers get in tune to shooting away at OD’d mutant baddies and look good doing it.
Weapons are so off-the-wall, Borderlands might get jelly.
Sunset Overdrive brings in—from what we see so far—around 6 absurd, bizarre weapons. Each are featured to make the combat look colorful, laughable and feel intuitive. Long gone are the boring regulars of rocket launchers and automatic pistols that offer nothing outside of protection from enemies. In Sunset Overdrive, every weapon has personality.
Two of the best weapons we’ve seen so far is TnTeddy and High Fidelity. The former, as the name would suggest, launches cute, fluffy teddy bears that have dynamite attached to them. With successful impact, the fumes from the explosion takes the form of….you guessed it, teddy bears. This is the only game where cute equal carnage.
The High Fidelity, one of my personal favorites, features a gun that shoots out vinyl records with razor sharp edges. On impact, it plays the songs of those records. Give “sweet chin music” a good run for it’s name by firing one of these bad boys into the face of the OD’d. This gun and many other weapons make Sunset Overdrive a highly-anticipated experience.
With so many games taking the usual zombie apocalypse route, Insomniac Games goes against the grain by providing a parodying element to the entire storyline, so much that the story even pokes fun at it’s own plot holes. This has us excited because despite having played a lot of the games with the usual apocalypse setup, we’re guaranteed to have a story that we can not only laugh at, but also be able to make a clear cut connection to real life.
A guy who works for a soda company doesn’t drink said soda and is therefore not effected by the horrible effects of turning into a mindless, ugly, ghastly creature? I already get the moral of the story, and I still want to play the game. Characters are pretty much aware that some of what goes on in Sunset City doesn’t make sense. In our POV, this is how you tell a story.
Take something so cliche, yet so senseless and spin it to the point where it’s okay for everything to not fall in line with reality. It’s a video game, for pipes sake! The fun should be rooted in what you play and from what we’ve seen thus far, the writers for Sunset Overdrive seem to have caught on to that idea early.
You can have a White Xbox One if you buy the bundle.
This isn’t an advertisement. At The Game Fanatics, we all agreed that we would throw down money for a white Xbox One. Considering that the bundle for this particular edition of the console comes with Sunset Overdrive, we feel that it makes for wreaking havoc around Sunset City better, richer and more entertaining experience. Plus, the white just looks sexy. Don’t believe us? I mean, you can double check. There’s a picture below. I’ll wait.
Getting around the city looks too legit to quit.
Your entire mode of transportation in this game is by grinding on top of rails, jumping between buildings, running alongside the walls and a myriad of other ways to get around. Your character will be flipping over billboards and grinding so much, that the game will almost look like a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game. There’s even a style meter for when you’re grinding and shooting away at enemies.
Not only is this the perfect way to get around Sunset City, but the game developers have also made it a strategy as well. When battling against OD Mutants, staying on higher ground is the best way to go. All of your enemies will be brutal and attack you mercilessly when you’re down on the ground. Grinding and shooting away is the way to go.
From what we’ve seen in some of the trailers, Sunset City is beautifully bursting with blue and orange colors meshed together in a huge metropolis. Given the exquisite images that stem from what you’ll see in Sunset Overdrive, we love that the game’s overall environment encourages people to avoid fast traveling from one place to the next.
You can bet that we’ll be gliding around every chance we get when Sunset Overdrive hits stores on Oct. 30.
