Sunset Overdrive’s Expansion Pack Is Lots of Fun, But Very Short

Microsoft

I love Sunset Overdrive, as you may recall. Microsoft’s big original game for Xbox One this year was a bright spot in a samey triple-A market, combining joyful open-city gameplay with a bright, inviting graphic style and a laugh-a-minute storyline.

Today, Insomniac unleashes the first bit of downloadable single-player campaign content, “The Mystery of the Mooil Rig.” Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity to head back into Sunset City and do some more quests. And there were quests, and they were excellent. But not very many of them. While “Mooil Rig” does include a variety of other add-ons for the game—new weapons, new objectives for the game’s cooperative multiplayer mode, etc.—if you’re buying it purely or primarily to experience the new single-player story mode, be aware that it’s fairly short.

Short, but solid. Sunset Overdrive’s greatest strength is traversal, the act of going from point A to point B in its sprawling city. You don’t walk or drive cars—you grind on railings and power lines, bounce off bushes (somehow), and glide through the air. Stringing together unbroken chains of stylish moves will zip you across the city (and up and down it), and it’s lots of fun even if you’re not going anywhere.

The best missions of Sunset Overdrive were thus the ones that let you gleefully run and jump and play, and this is what “Mooil Rig” focuses on. It’s set on an offshore drilling platform, and one of the first things you get to do is grind, jump and slide all around it shooting at mysterious eggs that have sprung up and blocked the machinery. These sorts of challenges are prioritized over straight-up firefights, although the expansion has its share of those as well.

Most notably, the player gains a new ability; they can dive into water and explode out of it in something resembling a Street Fighter shoryuken. This is more useful than it sounds: Prior to this move, it was impossible for a player to continually dash across the water without eventually sinking. Now, by stringing together moves, you can traverse water rapidly. This is used in many missions of Mooil Rig, and it’s more than just a cosmetic tweak; having to learn how to get across water effectively is a nice new gameplay wrinkle that you couldn’t have already mastered by playing the main game.

Sunset Overdrive had a large cast of increasingly amusing characters, but “Mooil Rig” just whittles it down to a select few, most of whom only show up as voiceover work through phones or intercoms. There’s not a lot of story to speak of, just a thin narrative to drive the action along.

Everything culminates in a wonderfully over-the-top boss battle that, like all the other content herein, is nicely executed, surprising, and fun. But once that’s done, all you’re left with is finding more collectibles for the sake of finding collectibles. Maybe if you’re deeply into the multiplayer mode, getting all the collectibles, weapons and such is important to you. But if like me you just want an adventure, “Mooil Rig” is over in a single leisurely after-work play session.