Game preview: Sunset Overdrive

<i>Sunset Overdrive</i> is not your average doom-and-gloom end-of-days video game.

Sunset Overdrive: it’s time to party at the "awesomepocalypse", says Paul Harper.

Sunset Overdrive's creative director Marcus Smith and game director Drew Murray acknowledge the gaming market is saturated with post-apocalyptic shooters.

"They've been done to undeath," Smith jokes.

However, Sunset Overdrive is not your usual doom-and-gloom end-of-days video game.

It's 2027, and in Sunset City beverage company Fizzco is holding a party to launch its new energy drink, Overcharge Delirium XT. Unfortunately, you're working as a cleaner so you miss the big event. However, in the rush to take the drink to market, Overcharge Delirium XT was not rigorously tested, and those who drink it mutate. The city is quarantined as the mutants, dubbed "OD'd", roam the streets. It's the end of days, but it is not your end of days. Where once you toiled, now you thrive. This is your "awesomepocalypse", as the makers put it.

"I'd say we're post-apocalyptic in theme and story, but it's not a survival horror game," Smith says. "It's hard for people to hear post-apocalyptic and not think of everything else, just the baggage that comes with that."

"I'm hoping some academic one day calls us 'post-post-apocalyptic'," Murray adds.

Smith and Murray were fans of Insomniac Games' flagship titles Ratchet & Clank and Spyro before joining the studio, but once on board spent their first dozen or so years working on the post-apocalyptic first-person shooter Resistance games. Sunset Overdrive was born from a desire to move away from the dark, depressing environment of Resistance, and return to the vibrant stylised visual Insomniac is famous for.

"We were both about to be fathers for the first time, at first that probably helped us get into the bleak, the whole 'what a horrible idea it is to bring a child in to this world - have you watched the news lately? It's awful!'" Smith says. "But then once they were born it's a whole new thing."

"You start seeing things through their eyes and things seem quite wondrous," Murray says.

"Working on Resistance benefited us as individuals and as a team, ... elevating our technical abilities to give us what you need to make a modern-day shooter, but I think when we had the chance, we wanted to take some of those ideas from a more hard-core game and combine those with what we love from the earlier Insomniac games - a sense of humour, a sense of irreverence, the colourful pallet. I always felt Ratchet & Clank revelled in the joy of being a video game.

"For us, in Sunset Overdrive, we're actually being super explicit 'this is a video game and we're not pretending it is anything else' and we're breaking the fourth wall to express that."

So the rule book has been ripped up. For a city under siege by mutants, Sunset City is a vibrant landscape - the game's designers were explicitly told "there is no rubble". The city's a giant playground; a word frequently heard at Insomniac's Burbank studios is "traversal" - how you get around is a big point of difference for this game. It's a mix between Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, Jet Set Radio, and Prince of Persia; you grind (sans board), pole swing, wall run, bounce and zip-line your way around Sunset City. Getting to grips with using the fantastic array of weaponry (see sidebar) while frantically moving is vital, as there's little time for taking cover.

"I know, personally, I'm tired of taking cover," Smith says.

One of the cool features in the game are the respawn animations. Die, and you'll return to the game in a sarcophagus, be thrown out of the back of a van , or dropped down to earth by aliens. Players may even look forward to dying.

"It doesn't make any sense that in video games you die and just pop back in," Murray says.

"I just had this idea, wouldn't it be funny if a coffin opened up and the player stood up and climbed out," Murray says.

Murray and Smith grew up on punk rock and it shows in their game, from the criticism of large corporations to the importance of self expression. Once the laws of a society are gone, they argue, social norms go with them. Sunset Overdrive embraces this idea.

Insomnia president and chief executive Ted Price, who founded the company in 1994, describes the game as a "shot across the bow of games which take a very dark and gritty view of the apocalypse".

"Our feeling is, we want to present the 'awesomepocalypse', the opportunity to have fun at the end times," he says.

"It's what you make of it - there are a lot of messages in the game ... from your interactions with the different factions in the game, through how we are presenting the overall story thread and the character's emotional progression ... It's like reading a book - everybody has some different take-aways, but there are some strong societal messages in there.

"Sunset Overdrive is an excellent example of who we are as a company, and what we love the most. If you look at all of our games, we take a lot of different paths, but we generally come back to games that are visually stylised, games that have a sense of humour, and games that really push the boundaries in various ways."

Release date: October 30
Platform: Xbox One
For fans of: Ratchet & Clank, The Walking Dead, Dead Rising 3

- TimeOut