In Sunset Overdrive energy drinks transform humans into hideous charicatures of themselves... hmmm.Insomniac Games
Genre: Open world third-person shooter.
What it's about: Shooting mutants with goofy weapons while riding around on rails.
Why we should care: Resistance and Ratchet and Clank developer Insomniac Games brings its irreverent humour to Xbox One. Also, it's exclusive to Microsoft's console and its flagship title for the holiday season. In other words, this could be is as good as it gets Xbox fans.
What happens in the first hour: After a brief character design session wherein we choose our nameless character's body type and face, a message tells us the vulgarity can be toned down in the settings.
A few seconds later, we hear our first F-word as our protagonist tries to escape a group of mutant monsters who crashed the subway he was on.
Two minutes in, he's holding a gun that has testicles called the "Flaming Compensator." Isn't it ironic that games rated "mature" are often the most puerile?
Sunset Overdrive, we learn, is a game all about jumping and bouncing on cars, which gets us up to electrical wires and steel railings. From there, we grind like an ace skateboarder, although how we do so while wearing flip-flops is never properly explained.
And of course there's the shooting. Developer Insomniac has made its name on kooky and innovative weapons in both the Ratchet and Clank and Resistance series, so that's to be expected here. Eventually, we get a gun that shoots exploding teddy bears.
But first we must discover how Sunset City came to be overrun by mutants. For that, we go back in time to a concert, where the FizzCo corporation is handing out free samples of its new energy drink.
Our protagonist is working as a janitor at the event. He's too wrapped up playing the Sunset Overdrive game on his phone – how very meta – to notice the soda turn everyone around him into mutants.
Before long, he's jumping, grinding, shooting and collecting "amp" power-ups for his own abilities and weapons. A style meter builds depending on how well he jumps and grinds, which activates the amps, which counts toward combos… oh dear lord, this is numbers game.
Games in this sub-genre insist on calculating some sort of points that ultimately have no meaning. Combined with the rest of what we've seen so far, it's obvious this is not a game that leans heavily on its narrative. It's all about the guns and the grinding.
Floyd, our scientist buddy who's a cross between Samuel L. Jackson and Dave Chapelle, confirms it: "You want amps. Trust me, you want amps." My heart sinks as I realize that's the whole point of the game. Moar amps.
Floyd tells us we need to defend a vat while an amp cooks inside. A host of mutants descend on it and a chaotic battle ensues, fuelled by punk rock in the background and a whole lot of swearing in the foreground.
Sunset Overdrive thus resembles one of those nonsensical Japanese game shows. There's a lot of noise and colour, but ultimately it's hard to tell what's going on. That makes it hard to care about.
Highlights: Sunset City is a colourful and intriguing open world, and the weapons are interesting, despite their sometimes low-brow nature.
Lowlights: Tries very, very hard to be hip and funny, which is self-defeating.
Time-suck factor: The game doesn't have much depth, although it does have a multiplayer mode, accessible through phone booths around Sunset City.
Worth more than an hour? The core grinding-and-shooting gameplay is different enough from most other shooters to be intriguing. But that's moot if you can't enjoy the attempts at cleverness and comedy that may grind on your ears. Somehow, we don't think this exclusive will be a system seller.
Peter Nowak