Sunset Overdrive (Xbox One, PC)

Oh, poor Sunset Overdrive. It’s had such a hard life. Launched on the original Xbox One in an absolute dead zone, just before one of the most chaotically stacked AAA holiday seasons in history, languishing while Microsoft slowly figured out that no, people weren’t going to be watching The Price Is Right on their console. While it did limp its way to a million copies sold, the game now sits in a horrible limbo, where Sony technically owns the rights to the IP, but Insomniac’s original contract for the game means Microsoft has exclusive rights to any sequels or ports. We can’t even get a PS5 port out of this, and Insomniac apparently being shackled to the Marvel machine for the next decade or so means we probably wouldn’t even if they wanted to.

So, right now, all we’ve got is the Xbox version, and the just-good-enough PC port of one of the most ridiculously fun open-world games of the last two generations.

Seriously, a game exists where you start out dismembering energy drink zombies with a gun that shoots vinyl records, and end up rail grinding into the stratosphere to murder a possessed inflatable corporate mascot, somewhere around the time King Buzzo from The Melvins plays a charity concert where he flies away like Mary Poppins, and Laura Bailey sings a punk-rock bard ballad during a post-apocalyptic D&D game where the king has forgotten how to get out of character. Somehow, this game did not sell 27 million copies. Shame on us.

This is, essentially, what Insomniac bringing that Ratchet & Clank spirit to an M-rated zombie game looks like. It’s wall-to-wall absurdities and smirking jokes, all while bringing the developer’s flair to the combat, and an exhilarating approach to traversal, much of which, unsurprisingly, wound up being good practice for Spider-Man. It’s never too late to experience The Awesomepocalypse, people.