A new water-based environment, missions designed to take advantage of that environment, and vaguely different enemy load-outs all come together for another quick dalliance in Sunset City. As far as downloadable content goes, Mystery of Mooil Rig is wholly traditional – but when it’s applied to a game as whimsically defiant as Sunset Overdrive, it’s tough to complain.
Inside Sunset Overdrive, Mystery of Mooil Rig feels like a natural string of narrative-focused missions. You get a call from Sunset City’s endearing quadriplegic, Brylcreem, who’s in trouble at a beach. Before long you’re flying off in a dog fight and welcomed to a brand new area, an oil rig set in the southwest sea of Sunset City. Going to the oil rig defaults the time of day to somewhere near dusk, blasting the lonely rig with a bolder and altogether different color pallet. It’s weird, this is the only place in the game where it’s actually sunset, and it works well inside Sunset Overdrive’s aesthetic.
All things considered, Sunset Overdrive had a great approach to water-based movement. Dealing with water in open world games – from Vice City to Assassin’s Creed – is usually tedious and slow. Sunset Overdrive partly solved this by allowing its character to Liquid Mountaineer across decent stretches of water. Mooil Rig pushes this philosophy even further, adding a new move that allows your main character to do a super jump/uppercut out of standing water. Combined with Mooil Rig’s glut of water and the relatively high rails lining its oil rigs, it’s a great and useful addition to Sunset Overdrive’s movement systems.
The rest of Mooil Rig is, well, more Sunset Overdrive. You take missions from debatably useful people and hilarious villains, all of which coalesce into a gigantic boss battle. Dialogue continues to run the gamut of fourth-wall breaking minutia, glaring commentary on modern videogames, harsh and direct Michael Bay criticism, and disappointing references to dated material. There’s a new chachkie to collect, a couple of new side missions to explore, and sweeping finale to put a bow on the entire package.
Mooil Rig’s new missions are also more of the same. You’ll scour the odds and ends of the oil rig to exterminate egg clusters. You’ll take part in fetch quests that task you with getting from A to B under the stress of time and combat. You’ll also hook up with Brylcreem (who’s inside a mech, for some reason) and he’ll launch you to key positions across the rig. New OD and angry union workers compose new enemies, but, aside from an obsession with fire, don’t function much different from their vanilla counterparts in the base game. Likewise, Mooil Rig offers a couple neat new weapons, but I never used them in favor of my existing high-level arsenal.
The nature of downloadable content is often an unmanageable and unwieldy double-edged sword. On one hand, players (probably) don’t want content that gets lost in the weeds and forgets which game it’s a part of. On the other, most people paying for this stuff have (probably) already played Sunset Overdrive for a couple dozen hours and may be exhausted with the fundamentals of its approach. So, what do you go with? Something old? Something new? Something else?
I don’t really have an answer to that. Under whatever terms it’s applied, Mooil Rig works by splitting the difference. It’s old content with a couple new things, all under the umbrella of one of 2014’s biggest surprises. As the first meaningful piece of post-release content, it basically does no wrong, which…is fine. For now. Expectations, however, are higher for Sunset Overdrive’s upcoming second and final piece of post-release content.
