Sunset Overdrive

Sunset Overdrive is an Xbox One exclusive game, released in North America on October 28th, 2014 by Insomniac.

The game is set in 2027, Sunset City. Fizzco was having a pre-release of there new energy drink but it goes wrong quickly. Everyone at the event who had drunk the energy drink turns into a monster known as OD. You a Fizzco employee working at the event flees to there apartment to survive. After a cut scene of OD breaking into your apartment, Walter comes and saves you only to throw you into a battle with OD after giving you the record launcher weapon. After you defeat all the OD you start the first part of the main story line of the game. Once completed you can then do side quests, challenges, and collect items to upgrade or acquire new badges. Following the story line is rather optional but beneficial. Though your role as the character is to figure out why this apocalypses happened and escape the city, while helping or killing other factions that get in the way.

You start the game in the Character customization screen. You pick out your characters hair, hair color, skin tone/face, clothes, body type/gender, and melee weapon.  After that you can reenter it by the clothes merchant to change anything on your character.

The core mechanics of the game are the movement system, overdrive system & amps system and Style system. The movement and style systems have a lot to do with each other since style increases as you move around. Moving around the city does not involve walking unless your going to talk with a NPC or interacting with an object. You get around the city by running on walls, bouncing on object like cars or mushrooms, jumping and doing flips off of bars, and grinding on things like power lines or fences. Doing a combination of these movements will increase your Style points which in turn increase the amount of damage your do.  The overdrive and amps are similar in basic purpose of them. They are both meant to boost your various skills or give bonus effects. Overdrives you can get by killing certain amounts of various enemies, using certain types weapons, or preforming certain movements. Once you have gotten some 'tokens' from completing enough of the aforementioned tasks you can exchange them for an overdrive. At which you can then equipt up to six overdrives. With amps you get them by exchanging toilet paper, shoes, balloons, overcharge signs, and cameras; or sometimes after finishing quests. Amps you equip to yourself or your weapons depending on the type of amp.  There being four types weapon, hero, epic, and melee. These give you bonuses to your attack, defense, special power ups, and the like. You can equip one of each melee, epic and dive bomb, and two hero amps.

Aside from the mechanics of the game it can be a challenge to get a hang of the controls while keeping your style meter maxed out or close to max. Once you get a hang of it though its the best way to get through the city. Avoiding enemies to quickly get to where you need to go. Or attacking enemies you see along the way to keep your style meter up with minimum damage done to you.