I say it's Tony Hawk meets Crackdown 2 meets Ratchet & Clank meets Prince of Persia. That's a nearly incomprehensible combination out of context, but when I floated that list to Sunset Overdrive creative director Marcus Smith, he added another title to it: Platinum Games' Vanquish. [...] Sunset Overdrive is in every way an oddity. It's an open-world game about monsters taking over a city that has since been quarantined — a la Raccoon City, except bright and happy — in which you will grind around on everything, as if you were riding a skateboard in a Tony Hawk game, shooting monsters and other varieties of baddies while helping out other survivors of this localized apocalypse. [...] It's fun but, perhaps more importantly, it's novel.

Sunset Overdrive is Insomniac's first truly open-world game. It's a kinetic, fast-moving shooter paired with acrobatic traversal inspired by games like Prince of Persia, Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. It's packed with the qualities Insomniac excels at: quirky animated characters, strange weapons and bright colors — and the occasional colorful innuendo. "This is Insomniac being Insomniac," said president and CEO Ted Price at Sunset Overdrive's unveiling. "This is the kind of game that we've all dreamed of developing for a long time." "It's the game we've been meaning to make for 20 years.