Sunset Overdrive review: Ride the rails up to Kaboom-town (finally on PC)

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Update: The new games are not lacking in this holiday season 2018, but we wanted to draw your attention to a jewel: the years 2014 Sunset Overdrive, a high visual stunner, focused on parkour. With apparently no fanfare, a PC version arrived yesterday for Windows PCs (Steam, Windows Store). Almost everything about the original games still applies to this PC version, so take advantage of our original test (which was first released on October 29, 2014) below. The room seems largely unchanged, but we have added some specific thoughts to the computer (well, Sunset 60fps!) And a gallery of the new edition towards the end.

Continue, continue, continue, continue. If I stay still, the monsters attack. If I stop slipping on the rails, bouncing on the hood of the car or abseiling on a zip line, everything will fall apart – the music in my head stops playing; the electricity stops crossing my dodge rolls; the fire stops vomiting from my hatchet in adhesive tape.

Welcome to Sunset City, a sunken, dilapidated corpse of a not so futuristic waterfront metropolis. The place was once invaded by self-surprised hipsters until they swallowed a brand new energy drink that turned them into crazy mutants (we mean literally, as opposed to the figurative craze of a high caffeine). In a certain way, "you" (as a relatively sturdy character creator, who sports the most stupid hairstyles known to man) avoided taking a sip and now you have to survive and escape. the madness alongside the few remaining human survivors.

Unlike all the others, you are well prepared. When you find powerful weapons, such as a cold ray or a bowling ball thrower, you can shoot anything that is in sight with a remarkable purpose. When you see a building edge, a zip line or any other object that can be ground or bounced, you become a super-fast and ultra-powerful parkour master.

In a practical way for you, Sunset City seems to consist almost entirely of poor quality weapons and sharp surfaces, and connects you to a relatively simple – and certainly familiar – playing style. Repression– an open world video game, divided into quests. Go ahead, blow up monsters, go ahead, find a hidden object, blow up other things, collect rewards, wash, rinse, repeat.

Sunset Overdrive has a great deal of superficial madness on the surface, from his brilliant and punk aesthetic to his meta-obsessed vulgar dialogue; from his gigantic and mutant beasts to the visually striking weapons used to dismember the said beasts. The game also wants to hurt your head with its style, but the developer Insomniac Games does not weaken and does not let loose because of this stylistic obsession.

Here's the weird thing: f-bombs and references to reddit eventually turn into white noise and you can yawn when a Popper explodes for the 1,000th time in a Nickelodeon-orange spurt, or when the game deliberately mocks another's quetch fetch. But Sunset OverdriveThe sense of urgency, fueled by a need for perpetual motion, never falters. It is the extreeeeme An open world video game that places money where your mouth is wide open.

As you can imagine, Sunset OverdriveThe structure does not focus on riddles or other brain platforms, but it is also not a game of "combat", contrary to what we could hope for Insomniac Games, the developers best known for its extreme madness. Ratchet and Ratchet series. While firearms play an important and explosive role, they are surprisingly stereotyped; the fact that the grenade launcher fires on teddy bears does not mean that it is not another grenade launcher, and that most other weapons offer visual gadgets over a gun that you have already seen. Instead, the real victory of the game lies in the crossing: by activating it and congratulating the players for doing it correctly.

Your "amps", a series of unlockable and evolving super powers, only work if you maintain a chain of grinds, bounces, wall breaks, killings and other maneuvers. The longer the channel, the more amps that turn on simultaneously. You need these amps for the fighting of the game, but you also have to keep moving to survive. The massive number of enemies you face also comes with explosions of acid, machine guns and other firepower that will propel your health bar into the ground if you walk and shoot like in other games. If you do not ride on the rails, you will roll very quickly on the pine.

Sunset Overdrive requires a lot of movement on the part of his players – and a lot of camera changes and perspective to keep pace – his weapons have been set to compensate. For the most part, winning in the battle is less about aiming to thwart big crowds beneath your trajectory, thanks to a combination of self-aiming machine guns and large area effect blasters. Install a trap to spit out acid; remove an impending swarm with a ricochet-loaded rifle that fires vinyl records; Stop a trio of snipers with an ice grenade (then break them with a melee smash).

Encourage players to spice up their parkour and blast, Sunset Overdrive also distributes badges for virtually every action you do. To grind a rail? Badge! Walls with rabbit jumping with pomegranate throwing? That's the progress you've made on three badges, bringing you a lot closer to new improvements in weapons, armor and maneuverability. In this direction, Sunset Overdrive feels a bit more like Tony Hawk than Radio Jet Set, at least in terms of demanding players, make the most of their variety of moves.

The city also hides approximately 9,420,768 collectibles (to give or take), which can be redeemed for further upgrades. What's important here is, even more than Repression before that, Sunset OverdriveThe crossing of this type of collectibles is enhanced by a nice and controllable mix of speed and consistent and reaffirming rewards.

A little too irreverent

The plot-based campaign has a lot to gain: a slow revelation of the beautiful surroundings of the game, a ton of well-designed battlefields loaded with rails on which to slide, a mess of crass, an awkward dialogue fueled by a Surprisingly capable cast of actors – but that's not all that challenge. Auto aiming helps fuel a lot of the fighting, and even if you're standing idiotic and dying, returning to life will not slow your progress too much.

Instead, the campaign is more like a training mode for classified optional challenges that players can raise to unlock giant cash bonuses and unique outfits. Some of them put you in a tower defense situation, where you set traps and handle waves of enemies (which have been duplicated in multiplayer). Others ask you to get around a road as fast as possible or to fight enemies with specific requirements in terms of bonus points.

All of these require a lot more focus than the campaign – more planning for the fastest parkour routes, a smarter bounce between weapons, a better strategy to maximize destruction points – and a requirement for players seeking the best grades. The developers have found a good balance between a playable and fun campaign that allows players to relax a bit and a handful of brutal and well-composed challenges.

Unfortunately, while co-operative multiplayer modes are essentially a classified challenge structure, the challenge has not been adapted to the new number of players. Six players can bombard each challenge with effect zone attacks that only seem to be designed for two players, and they end as quickly as they begin.

In better news, Sunset Overdrive is the visual stunner that Xbox One has needed for so long (snoozer Ryse notwithstanding). This game is a box of colorful cereals and wild patterns, with great drawing distances, impressive facial animations, swarming mutant swarms, humorous explosion effects and smooth scrolling speeds to reinforce the sense of the speed of the game

The way the game handles the plot is just as important, namely that it creates a sense of belonging without asking the player to necessarily invest in things like characters or gags . Jokes and sneaky comments come and go too fast for players to feel that screenwriters care too much about any of them, which makes it much easier to digest that's a game loaded with humor that takes his humor too seriously.

My main ox with humor came with the repeated need for the game to break the fourth wall. That was fine, but when the main character continues to make fun of the game's relatively boring quest structure, he begins to get the impression of choosing a particularly annoying scab.

Even these fetch-style quests are forgivable, as Insomniac has described the ever-fiercer maneuvers and fights – the central loop of the game – instead of trying to reinvent the open world wheel. Sunset Overdrive is a big, silly, fast shooter who knows his place in the big dumb game pantheon and, quite frankly, delights in it.

Good

• The Parkour system combines speed, bonuses and rewards to anchor the satisfying kernel of the game.
• The fight is part of a system that is always moving without making aiming or navigating a pain during the memorable and memorable explosive battles of the game.
• Between gigantic beasts, killer robots and a beautiful ultra-bright city, this game is the most beautiful Xbox One.
• The surprisingly funny plot knows its place in this high performance game and benefits from a stellar voice cast.

The bad

• Campaign mode may appear to work on autopilot.
• Weapons can seem cool or fun, but you've seen them before.
• Multiplayer modes have not been sized for problems with five or more players.

The ugly one

• Mocking the biggest problems of your game through jokes does not solve them.

Verdict: Xbox One owners who need an action solution should buy, buy, buy.