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You can tell a lot about a game by the first thing it chooses to teach its players. Sunset Overdrive doesn't kick off by baffling you with a bunch of pointless upgrades and unlockables that you couldn't care less about. It tells you how to pull off a dodge roll, a punkish splinter of weaponised evasion that gets to the heart of the game's deliriously pleasing traversal system. Then it baffles you with a bunch of pointless upgrades and unlockables that you couldn't care less about.Seriously, though, that dodge roll. After a wobbly period of grit and grime, a kind of thematic pebble-dashing of the CV, Insomniac's latest is set in Sunset City, a breezy and laudably colourful metropolis where a new fizzy drink has turned everyone into breezy and laudably colourful mutants. There's a bit more plot beyond that, but not much. The most important thing the game's story has to do is dunk you into a compact yet cleverly designed playground filled with former people to kill.
This is one of those open-worlders where your character is just a blunt avatar to be dressed up in whichever stupid haircuts, samurai helmets and pyjama bottoms you can find along the way, and where each wipeout sees you warping back into the mayhem via Bill and Ted's phone booth or a Portal portal. Inevitably, late on in proceedings, the plotting tries to give you a bit more depth; Christopher Vogler would be proud, but the graft doesn't stick. At most, you're a clothes rack and a shadow here. At best, you're sheer forward momentum.
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