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Sure, a Video Game About Killing Zombies High on Energy Drinks

"I’ve never played a game that deters you so hard from simply walking with your player."
Screenshot from the Sunset Overdrive trailer. Image: YouTube

Marcus Smith, creative director on colourful blockbuster Sunset Overdrive, seemed to be caught a little off guard when I asked if making a game about mutating energy drinks was a little like biting the hand that keeps them caffeinated.

"Not at all, not at all," said Smith. "We do drink a lot of energy drinks in this industry, and as players, and it seems like the natural course of events that a giant corporation would be able to make this disaster happen. We wanted to ask how would the world end for video games? I figured it would be someone making a huge mistake, but magnified through a giant corporation, the kind of power that they possess. So maybe the energy drink is a little close to home."

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Sunset Overdrive is an apocalypse game players can understand: Guns made from scavenged junk, an overstimulated city overrun with energy drink starved zombies, and roaming raider gangs in goofy themed attire. For better or worse, the upcoming Xbox One game waves its hands about with two cartoon middle fingers extended.

The dumbest thing you can do is the smart thing, and the game punishes you for losing your stupid blind momentum.

Some of Sunset Overdrive's marketing has made me groan. The last E3 trailer was a fourth-wall breaking spoof in which a pop punk dude with hair that looks like he just had brain surgery makes fun of a soldier's "cover mechanics" before leaping around a warehouse and blowing up every living thing in sight.

I typically have allergic reactions to those who think murder jokes are the highest form of comedy. I worried that Insomniac Games, who previously gave the world Spyro and Ratchet & Clank, were building a world inhabited by human manifestations of a baseball cap worn backwards.

But after an extended sit-down with the game, in which I made my character a caveman in denim booty shorts, I learned that if the trailers are going to be eye-rolling contrarians that at least the mechanics of the game work just as hard to undue the straight-laced conventions.

If you've been playing plenty of games this decade, you know that most have player resurrection as an assumed function, and risk isn't always reward. As in, running face first into a room full of your well armed enemies will end with you restarting from the last checkpoint. When you do get hurt, it's time to retreat to some box or pillar to duck behind until your health regenerates. Sunset Overdrive says to that recent universal truth, more than anything else, "nah."

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You scoot around wires and cars, not unlike the inFamous games, but where that game and so many others encouraged taking cover to recuperate, Sunset Overdrive will swat at your hand from trying to do the same. The dumbest thing you can do in Sunset Overdrive is the smart thing, and the game punishes you for losing your stupid blind momentum.

I've never played a game that deters you so hard from simply walking with your player. Compared to hopping on car tops and grinding along power lines like a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game, travelling on foot feels like you're scrunching along a sticky cinema floor. Standing still or running away will chip more damage off you than going guns blazing across the network of dizzying heights. And while it may seem simple for a game to say 'what's up is down,' it actually takes more getting used to than you think.

"The entire world had to be crafted around your movement abilities," says Smith. "When we had originally demoed early on, we didn't think we'd be doing all these traversal elements, it kind of grew out of people on the team pushing that. But we had a generic city, after we started adding all the chaining together, we rebuilt the city around that. As you move through the world, things get more vertical."

The game isn't all anti-brain usage. Swarm, tower-protection type activities, asks players to jerry-rig Home Alone traps around an environment to protect from drooling ghoulies. But those traps will still result in cartoon 'shabams' and all the while you maneuver around the place via dangling chilli lights and roller coaster tracks. The game is so 'No Country For Moving Like an Old Man.'

I might not be able to get over Overdrive's mooning-ass-from-a-moving-car tone, and that rebellious aesthetic may be overdone and made pointless by itself, but I can respect that it's willing to rebel against other AAA releases under its zitty skin.