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Preview: Sunset Overdrive

Sunset Overdrive easily had the best trailer at the E3 press conferences this year. Tongue-in-cheek, the game ripped into cover-based shooters and Call of Duty clones, aggressively asserting it would be something different altogether.

For the most part, it is.

Imagine Jet Set Radio with a shooting mechanic. That’s Sunset Overdrive in a nutshell.

We got to go hands-on with a 15 minute horde type mode in the game, where a group of gamers took on waves of mutants, all trying to take out two stationary containers of Overdrive.

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As you’d expect, we were coached before playing, told to keep to the rooftops and to use telephone cables to traverse the map. This was quite effective; pressing and holding X to attach to a grindable surface gave you the chance to use the right-stick to really get a sense of the map below. Jumping off of a cable and jumping again on most surfaces gives you the chance to trampoline, gain incredible height, and search for other grindable areas.

If you just reach a grindable surface like a telephone line, you’ll hang from a crowbar and can use a one-handed weapon to dispatch enemies. Pressing X again from that state will let you ride it skateboard-style, freeing you up to use two-handed weapons. Pressing X again from that state will cause you to roll and grind in the opposite direction that you were travelling in. It’s quite intuitive and you’ll have the hang of grinding in no time.

Most surfaces are grindable, and those that aren’t will mostly give you the chance to wallrun. I didn’t do a lot of that myself, nor did I see anyone else doing that either. The map that we were on was quite small and didn’t provide opportunities to get around via wallrun like Titanfall did. Instead — and as we were told – grinding high above the map was the way to go.

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Breaking away from my advice, I used grindables to get an idea where enemies were, and then sped to the combat zone, hitting the ground and blasting away at enemies like in a more traditional third-person shooter. Your character is fast and quite mobile, so you shouldn’t remain still while shooting, and you really need to go into defensive mode. The game’s trailer wasn’t kidding when it mocked cover systems.

The game’s quirky weapons are quite fun to use. A standard AK-47(ish) weapon and the record disc shooter are good for sniping and taking care of large groups of the game’s weakest enemies. One-handed guns like the dragon shooter can also be used for weaker enemies, but are affective against the larger enemies as well. It’s also quite rewarding when you take someone out with the dragon gun, and see a bunch of fireworks erupt from a dispatched corpse.

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I’m sure this won’t be the case as I play more, but I found that most of the game’s weaponry was pretty interchangeable; everything worked against everyone, with the exception of the AK and the record gun against the big herker boss, seen in the Xbox E3 Media Briefing. That’s awesome, though; because the game’s crazy – and that includes its weaponry — you don’t want to be stuck sitting on the weapon wheel trying to figure out what to use. Randomly choosing a gun and jumping, grinding and shooting seems to be the way to go.

All up, Sunset Overdrive is a cavalcade of colour and spectacle that makes you get as active as the world around you. While the horde mode we played was fun, I think I’d much enjoy the game proper. My only concern after playing for fifteen minutes is that the aforementioned spectacle might become a little wearing over prolonged periods, but we’ll see if that’s the case when the game is released on 28 October for Xbox One.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.