As fun as the traversal and combat is in this game, a lot of the repetitive activities simply don't feel compelling enough to repeat. All of the variety in the game comes from your weapons and mods, all of which feel really great to toy around with, but the actual activities are much more limited. Defend something, or go fetch something, and fight OD while doing so.
There's good fun in the chaos, but there's a limit to how long I want to keep doing the same things. It a surprise for me considering I usually find all of the things that Insomniac packs into a game to be fun. I usually fully complete Insomniac games simply because I enjoy the ride. Sunset Overdrive feels like a game packed full of more, simply to meet some idea of what an open world game should be in 2014. It also feels far more driven by the fact that they expected a specific type of Xbox player, people used to things like a robust multiplayer mode. It feels less like Insomniac's PlayStation outings where a solid single player campaign, full of fun things to do, is the primary focus.
Which brings me back to Spider-Man. So many ideas were borrowed from their game to make Spider-Man. There is even a segment where you chase a target, while drugged. It feels strikingly similar to the Scorpion chase sequence in Insomniac's Spider-Man, simply swap the venom pools and bottomless pits of Spider-Man for lava in Sunset Overdrive. While combat in the two games is different (crowbars and guns versus fists and webs), the systems that prop up that combat are very similar. You have similar mods that you equip, that augment your combat. In Sunset Overdrive those are amps and overcharge, and Spider-man it's suit augs and tech upgrades. The similarities in movement are even greater. It's a joy to move around thanks to the fluidity of grinding and bouncing in Sunset Overdrive and swinging and web zipping in Spider-Man. Truly, the heart of both games is their movement and the strongest aspect carried from Sunset Overdrive to Spider-Man.
Where Spider-Man truly excels over Sunset Overdrive is in its character development and story. As entertaining as Sunset Overdrive can be, it is far more like a poor Saint's Row clone than a truly fleshed out game that stands on its own merit. It tries very hard to be crass in its humour, but most jokes are more cringeworthy than they are satirical. Saints Row is a thorough skewering of film, television and video game media with a significant amount of both meta- and intertextual discourse. Sunset Overdrive feels like a game that barely scratches the surface I that respect, that placed all its eggs in the basket of stupid humour peppered with the word fuck. Sure, at times I laughed, but the stereotypes and reference in Sunset Overdrive lack substance, they lack conviction beyond "hey stupid sounding shit seems funny." So you have weird jokes about adult troop scouts, and larpers, the usual lazy "hey nerds are silly" or "fat dudes are funny" or some weird ableist shit revolving around a troop leader who had to eat all his limbs to survive for 16 days in a garbage truck. And sure, the nerds seems to hold their own, and one could say the game attempts to redeem the same groups it lambasts, but the jokes are so simplistic and mean spirited that they fall flat. It's writing that seems to rest on the idea that ridiculing people works as satire as long as you show them kicking ass. It doesn't work because it's overly simplistic and poorly delivered. There's nothing wrong with crass humour, because what is crass can often break down things like stereotypes by accurately skewing and revealing the absurdity of those stereotypes. But Sunset Overdrive doesn't do the work that it takes to do that, and just feels like a game that wanted characters and a story that sounds as irreverent and cool as the game is fun to play. It nails the latter but fails the former.
And I would be remiss if I don't talk about the weird way the game includes Queerness, a way that I think provides a wonderful snapshot of game design in 2014. You only have two choices of gender presentation in the game. Unlike Saints Row, which I've already mentioned I think Sunset Overdrive takes inspiration from, you can't mix and match things like body and voice. If you pick a female body you get a feminine presentation, if you pick a male body you get a masculine presentation. It's a pretty cut and dry binary.
And then you start the game and it becomes clear that despite the very decent work of the female protagonist's voice actor, this game had male as default in mind. Every tutorial scene features the male hero, every joke revolves around the idea that your hero is a guy. And that idea that the main character is male makes the game either exceptionally straight, or exceptionally Queer, depending on your choice at the beginning of the game. And it's all because none of the dialogue or scenarios are changed to reflect anything other than male straightness. Thus, if you play the hero presenting as a woman, everything is suddenly hyper Queer. The characters that hit on you are pretty exclusively women. The jokes about who or what you find sexy all revolve around attraction to women. So if you choose to play the game as a female character, you get to play as a pretty rad lesbian kick ass hero. If you chose to play as a guy you're...well you're another regular old straight video game dude.
The sad part it I can't really give Insomniac points for any of the Queerness in theme, because it's clearly just a byproduct of running the same dialogue that was intended for a straight dude through the talents of a female voice actor. She plays it with her own stye, but it is still distinctly pretty heteronormative stuff if you pick the male character. So in the end it provides us less a template for a progressive approach to AAA game development, and more an approach that sees male players as the main demographic. Players who probably will largely play as the default male protagonist. And the rest of those who might pick the female protagonist are likely an imagined audience of guys who could find the slight nods to Queerness kinda hot. Anyone else was probably no more than an afterthought, a demographic not worth actively catering to.
I should be clear, I doubt anyone at Insomniac or Microsoft had any ill intent whatsoever, it's just interesting to consider this game as means to judge assumptions about gaming audiences in 2014, and which members of those audiences devs were actively courting. It's also interesting to consider that Sunset Overdrive is likely not specifically not Queer, but it also probably is largely only accidentally Queer, and only if you pick one of the two gendered presentations in the game.
And as for overall narrative, Sunset Overdrive is fairly barebones, the minimum required to string together reasons to go nuts in an ope world playground. Thankfully the gameplay mechanics are fun enough to carry you through, but unlike Sider-Man, there's nothing memorable about the characters or story. It's just something to justify attacking mutant enemies with acid sprinklers and TNT Teddies. But as fun as Insomniac games can be, they usually have more of a complete story to tell. Insomniac devs aren't perfect, and make mistakes even in their best games, but I think their strength lies in compelling single player games with solid mechanics and an enjoyable story. Maybe Sunset Overdrive was an experiment for them, a chance to ignore trying to match a story up to the crazy mechanics they wanted to play around with. And as a playground in which to wreak havoc, it's mostly a pretty good game. But compared to a lot of their other games, it's an amusing distraction that likely led to a much better series of games in Spider-Man and Miles Morales.
One last thing: wayyy too many characters repeat themselves all the time. Fast travel and somebody is going to repeat the last line they said to you two minutes prior. Spend too much time goofing around on the map, somebody is going to repeat instructions about what to do next for your active mission. Insomniac wants you to have a good time in their vast playground, but doesn't have the guts to take off your training wheels to let you actually mess about on your own.
