Sunset Overdrive Trailer Blows Minds

Insomniac and color are getting back together.

So it’s really impossible to talk about Insomniac’s excellent trailer for Sunset Overdrive without bringing up the similarly brilliant trailer for Overstrike, a game which took a surprise detour into bland town mid-way through development, eventually reemerging as Fuse. Hopefully, the critical and commercial failure of Fuse will ward the Ratchet & Clank and Resistance developer away from the evils of “gritty” realistic graphics, because if this trailer is anything to go by, Sunset Overdrive will look fantastic.

So what have we got? Some kind of cartoonish, near-future city filled with mutants that look like they were yanked straight from a Saturday morning cartoon and a set of lanky protagonists with a design aesthetic pitched somewhere between Team Fortress 2 and the beautiful, but ultimately terrible, Brink. Then there’ the visual sound effect cues which have the comic-fan in me positively salivating. What kind of game is it? I don’t care, I’m all about the pretties, but I’m told it’s an “open-world shooter,” whatever that means these days.

Is there a downside? Depends on how you feel about used games and always-online, as Sunset is an Xbox One exclusive. An odd decision for Insomniac, as the developer has traditionally been in Sony’s pocket.

“When we first began discussing this idea with Microsoft, we were initially hesitant to shift back into an exclusive arrangement,” explains CEO, Ted Price. “But as the Microsoft team began introducing us to the abilities and philosophies driving the development of Xbox One, we knew that Sunset Overdrive was a perfect fit. The Xbox One and Xbox Live will support our ambitions to create an ongoing two-way dialogue with our community. It will also allow us to have quicker production cycles, enabling timely content updates for new weapons, characters, storylines and even pop culture-relevant content like memes based on social commentary.”

There’s no release window for Sunset Overdrive just yet.

For those interested, the track used in the trailer is They Come to Get Us by Australian electro-punk outfit, The Death Set.