YMMV / Sunset Overdrive

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: You really can eat tree bark, provided it's the right kind of tree.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • While a mild example compared to other games, early to mid-game Floyd will repeatedly pressure the player into making sure to equip Amps on themselves and their weapons, especially before a mandatory Night Defense sequence.
  • Wendy will beckon you to get trash to heal your boat whenever it's not at full health. It's pretty difficult to keep it at full health all of the time, so expect to hear her constantly.
  • The game will constantly, though non-vocally, remind the player that they have weapons without an amp equipped.
• Awesome Music: Most of the soundtrack, assuming your style level is high enough that you can hear it, but just about everyone loves 'Sunset City'.
  • Special mention for the bard rock track that Wendy plays.
  • White on White by Fidlar that plays on a Night Defense mission is a song that will get you pumped up to kill an army of OD coming at you.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While the game itself is no stranger to strangeness, of note are the UFOs that attack you while doing Hardcore's quest. They show up out of nowhere with little foreshadowing and are given nary a mention afterwards.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Once you get all the traversal abilities it's a lot of fun to dash around the city, leaving a trail of enemies in your wake.
  • Picking a weapon like, say, the Roman Candle and going into a huge crowd of enemies (like in Night Defenses) and blowing up every OD feels extremely satisfying and cathartic to say the least.
• Crazy Is Cool: The player has a few moments of this, especially in the "Awesomesmithing" mission: the player wants to make a sword to impress Las Catrinas. How do they do it? By taking some trophies made of titanium, throwing them into a nuclear power plant's cooling tower, destroying the control devices to heat it up, then jumping into the tower to strike the metal. The result is a sword that shoots fire and lightning in addition to stealing enemies' souls. Awesome, but a sane person probably would never have gotten the idea to do this. After the mission is over, it gets downgraded into a simple melee weapon like all the others you've been collecting because otherwise the game would have lost all challenge.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Ritalinfant. Ritalin for babies!
  • Troop Master Bryllcream. Being kidnapped and gone missing for 16 days? Not funny. Finding him without his limbs in what very heavily implies he had to resort to Autocannibalism to survive? Darkly amusing, but still not very funny. Him creating a Mini-Mecha which he controls to fight beside you? Narm-tastically awesomesauce.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Muggers have a divebomb that deals a lot of damage, and will attack you relentlessly if they're up close. The game encourages you to stay in the air constantly, and these guys are a good reason why.
  • Wingers are Airborne Mooks, and have all the annoyances associated with them. Trying to concentrate your fire on them while making sure you don't run into any fire their lasers create is a chore.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The reference to gaming forum NeoGAF at the end has now aged horribly after most of the site staff and community left and reformed as ResetEra after various scandals arose about site founder Tyler Malka.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • After running through an OD infested city, Sam's friends refuse to help you in your journey. Sam is disappointed in them and gives a speech about what a hero you are.
  • How Sam and the player met: The player ran into Sam while trying to source a replacement propellor for Walter's glider and, despite not yet knowing that Sam would be of any use to their mission, went out of their way to rescue him from being attacked by ODs.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Dirty Harry, despite it's simplicity, is an amazing weapon. Once leveled up, it can down many types of OD and Scabs with just one bullet, and combined with weapons that cause stacking Status Effects are very effective ways of quickly and reliably killing Herkers, Spawners, and Wingers especially from a distance.
  • Rather appropriately, The Roman Candle (which is pictured in the game's cover alongside the Player wearing the Sleepless outfit), is one of the best crowd control weapons in the game. While it chews through ammo very quickly, it more than makes up for it with its absurd damage output against OD, being able to clear hordes of them in seconds on top of racking up Style very quickly. It's basically this game's equivalent of the R.Y.N.O. V.
  • The Second Amendment amp, especially when upgraded. When equipped on a weapon, it makes ammo for that weapon drop more often. It eliminates the need for switching weapons, and when put on a powerful one like the Hair Spray Bomb, or the Roman Candle, you can eliminate large swaths of enemies with ease without ever worrying about running out of ammo.
  • The Taunt Bot weapon creates holographic decoys that take all enemy aggro away from the player for an extended period, leaving them free to attack the crowds that cluster around it with impunity.
  • Overdrives that buff weapon damage can be stacked, making it possible to eliminate even the toughest Damage Sponge in a single volley. Even enemies that are strong against certain weapons can go down in a single shot from it. The AK-FU in particular becomes capable of eliminating everything in front of you in a hitscan hail of bullets.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The regular OD easily become this while you're performing transversals during combat since it's all too easy to get distracted by the sheer chaos of the fights and have one punching you out of your grid or knock you around right as you bounce off something. Not too dangerous, but very freaking annoying and can quite possibly ruin your combo and make you lose style meter.
  • Poppers. Their tactic is to run right at you when provoked and then explode. If you're caught off-guard and there's a horde of them, you can expect to be knocked down over and over.
  • Blowers and Gunkers, especially in multi-level areas. Just finding where they're shooting you from can be a chore.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the game, when you rescue Sam from some of the ODs, he asks you if you're a superhero. The VA for the male protagonist, Yuri Lowenthal, actually does become a superhero in this same developer's very next game.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Fizzco Spokesman, after successfully hyping up Overdrive prior to Horror Night, masquerades as a Mysterious Informant who tasks the Player with gathering evidence of Fizzco's corruption, claiming that he'll use it to expose the corporation's crimes to the world. After tricking the Player into destroying the last piece of evidence, the Spokesman reveals himself, explaining that he had them collect items connecting Fizzco to the mutant outbreak so he could personally get rid of it all. He then sends Fizzco bots to kill the Player, citing them as the last piece of evidence. By the time the Player defeats all of the robots, the Spokesman had already escaped, having ensured that the world never knows of Fizzco's atrocities.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: By design, as most of the plot revolves around finding new excuses to leap and grind around, killing enemies, and making deliveries. The story beats are little more than short, comedic sketches to set up the next goalpost.
• Polished Port: The PC port released in 2018 is absolutely stellar, running like hot butter on high-end systems and boasting an unlocked framerate with certain settings, as well as nice resolutions support. While this does come at the cost of the multiplayer, it's not all bad, since the rest of the game is still present and playable.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • It's the best next-gen Tony Hawk game never made.
  • It's also the closest thing we'll probably get to a modern Jet Set Radio game.
  • Or, aside from the use of guns instead of a big hammer, it could be said that it's the closest thing we'll get to a dedicated Amy Rose game.
• Spiritual Successor: To Insomniac's own Ratchet & Clank series, sharing its third-person shooter / platformer gameplay, zany arsenal, and upgradable weapon system. And with the game's more cynical tone and frequent jabs at large corporations, Sunset Overdrive is more specifically a spiritual successor to R&C's original four PS2 installments.
• The Scrappy: Esperanza, due to being a Jerkass who bullies the Player Character while they do nothing but try to get her respect, and the fact that she never gets her comeuppance.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Killing regular enemies in the main world gives what amounts to pocket change, with a moderately large horde barely giving you two digits of OverCharge, making it feel largely unrewarding— even if you kill THOUSANDS of enemies you'll barely get what's needed for the cheapest items from Floyd and Two-Hat Jack stores since stuff that they sell range anywhere from 3,000 to 100,000 OverCharge to buy.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Dude. While the concept of a Bowling Ball Launcher sounds badass, the weapon itself is very tricky to use and score hits/kills with. By the time you can purchase it, you'll probably already have at most seven other weapons- all of which can fire instantly without having to charge up and can inflict damage faster and more reliably on opposing forces.
• That One Achievement: Chaos in Downtown, which requires you to complete Chaos Squad in Downtown District with at least 1625% Chaos. You need a full well-coordinated team to even have a chance at finishing the Night Defense portion.
• That One Level:
  • The "Monster's Ball" mission from the Fizzco factory DLC. The first half is incredibly fun as you're rendered more or less immortal and able to even wipe out even a Fizzco security tankbot in 2 hits. Then a counter appears and you have a little over 3 minutes to get a count of nanobots up to 1000 before the counter hits 0 otherwise you'll die. You can only get those nanobots by killing the new Fizzco security bots, worth 25 nanobots, which are sparsely scattered through the level, but at least in marked locations. Although, it requires getting a hang of the different weakened initial jump mechanics. Only the second jump on a bouncy surface gets higher than human-form jump height. Tankbots do drop 200 nanobots but they're even more scarce. What's more every time you die, you start over to do it all over again. This level will really test your patience with the game.
  • The Tastes Like Chicken mission is also hair-pullingly frustrating. In order to get food for King Ignatius, you have to murder 500 pigeons in a tight time limit. There are various fire traps scattered throughout the level but they require a helper to throw seed at them to attract the pigeons. Style Level also seems to affect how many pigeons are killed, but that's never mentioned. They fly away if you get too close and your gun will only kill a handful at a time. If you're too far away from the trap the helper throws the seed at they can all be gone by the time you get to it. Prepare to play that minigame over and over and over again.
• That One Sidequest: Earning Gold Medal on some of Buck National challenges can be very difficult and basically demand you either memorize the order of the challenges and come with Level 5 weapons otherwise you won't kill stuff quick enough to rack points for it.
• Too Cool to Live: Walter survives on his own, knows how to build a glider, and seems to figure out the intent of others with ease. He sacrifices himself by throwing the player out of the glider before it hits an invisible electric wall.
• Unintentional Period Piece: One of the game's more divisive aspects is its high use of references to contemporary social media and Internet memes. One of which is Doge.
  Player: Wow. Such murder. Very death.
• Vindicated by History: While the game received positive reception at release, the gaming community quickly ended up dismissing it as a mostly unremarkable open world title that tried too hard to be funny. That combined with the Xbox One's poor performance and more anticipated releases coming from the very company Insomniac had split from lead the game to fall by the wayside and get labeled as just another misstep in Insomniac's recent string of lackluster titles. However thanks to a well-regarded PC port as well as a general consensus that the studio has broken out of their Audience-Alienating Era thanks to their Spider-Man series and the unexpectedly acclaimed Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, many have begun to look back at Sunset Overdrive with much more fondness. What once was seen as nothing special is now held up as a hidden gem that has stood the test of time thanks to its striking art style, outlandish (if at times dated) sense of humor, and exhilarating gameplay that is retroactively respected for laying the foundation for Spider-Man and Rift Apart.

---