Beyond Sunset PC review — Melted by grenades

It’s truly a wonderful feeling to have a game greatly surpass your expectations. Beyond Sunset‘s first level is damn good, to be certain, but it really grabbed me with its second one. It was far more complex, visually interesting, and captivating, which is really saying something since the first level is truly no slouch. But after beating the second of the game’s five levels, it never recaptured that spark. The remaining three levels are all still pretty good, but some odd design choices, missteps, and uneven quality on display makes the game a bit rougher around the edges than its early parts promise.

Beyond Sunset is a sprite-based first-person shooter made in the GZDoom engine, so its menus will be extremely familiar to anyone who’s spent any time with it before. But the similarities mostly end there, as the game is quite different from Doom. As previously stated, there are only five levels, but they range from about 45 minutes to an hour-and-a-half in length or so, making the game take about seven-to-eight hours in total. This works perfectly fine considering its low price tag (which it is very much worth.) The game’s been in Early Access for some time and, since those games are often uneven, it’s not too surprising that this one is as well.

You play as a character named Lucy, who by default has the ability to double jump and has two dash charges. Weapons include a katana, infinite energy pistol that can be charged up, a shotgun with a grenade attachment, a rifle with a missile attachment, and an extra powerful gun that can mostly decimate whatever it hits. The kicker is that the katana can deflect most enemy projectiles, which heals you every time you do so. This is one of Beyond Sunset‘s neatest features, as it allows you to turn desperate situations around as long as you’re paying attention. Defeating enemies also builds up a meter that lets you instantly kill a weaker one, granting you extra health and ammo.

Much like Doom Eternal, you’ll be using all of this to stay alive and keep yourself stocked up on ammo, as it’s fairly easy to run out. Plus, you really only have two effective guns, so you can’t swap between a whole bunch of them to spread your bullets out. The guns aren’t quite as impactful as I’d hoped, with the rifle in particular feeling pretty weightless, but the shooting is fun enough. You’ll also go into a cyberspace area to open doors in the real world, similarly to the first System Shock. I’m fond of the gameplay systems here and think the devs did a very good job of giving it fun stuff to play around with, despite the lack of guns.

The real star here, however, is the exploration. Maps are mostly expansive and packed with detail. The art direction is excellent, using an 80s vaporwave aesthetic that it absolutely nails. The colour palette here can be really satisfying to look at, as the art does a terrific job of capturing the sort of aesthetic it’s aiming for. But the exploration is only as good as the level it takes place in. All the game’s levels look and feel very different, but as I said, they’re of uneven quality. The first level takes place in a high tech building that kicks things off with a bang. Most levels see you completing major objectives, so it’s not so much a keyhunter-type game.

The opening level, for instance, wants you to break open cryo containers that you find while exploring. The game’s second level is one of the best levels I’ve ever seen in a boomer shooter. It takes place in a cyberpunk town where you’re tracking down gangsters to cut their hands off and use them to open doors. There’s also a mostly optional quarantine district that houses a couple of side quests (including an optional boss battle,) that you can get from vendors you’ll meet in the main areas. I thoroughly enjoyed taking my time exploring and fighting here, and it left my expectations for the rest of the game sky high.

But then level three happens. Level three is fine, but it’s both significantly more standard and less visually interesting than its predecessors. Set in stark white, green, red, and gold locations reminiscent of the Tron movies, I was a bit underwhelmed with the look of this one. You mostly just go from sector to sector fighting waves of enemies and flipping switches. It’s a lot less imaginative than the rest of the game. That being said, it’s still good, I was just disappointed that the rest of the game didn’t keep the level of quality up. This level does have a cool gimmick where you can pick a character to work with against two others, which I appreciated.

I found the fourth level even more disappointing. It’s the shortest level in the game and a significant amount of it is spent running back and forth repairing turrets during an enemy assault. It’s a novel idea, but I’m not so sure it goes all that well with the rest of the game. The earlier part of the level feels more linear than the others and some of the signposting isn’t great. One of my biggest issues is the new enemy that shows up in this level. Enemies come in multiple variety, from melee fighters, ones with guns, and big mechs that come with flamethrowers or grenade launchers.

Beyond Sunset has a pretty even difficulty curve for its first few levels, but level four introduces mechs that shoot a volley of grenades. These grenades can absolutely melt you, as getting him by a single one does a huge amount of damage. During the last couple waves of the turret repair survival section, however, the game throws them at you in droves, meaning that it’s easy to die almost immediately while doing a repair if you get hit by a grenade volley. It really irritated me and I couldn’t wait for this section to end so that I didn’t have to bother any more.

Of course, they come back in level five too, which has the worst signposting in the game. Levels two, three, and four have persistent upgrades for your health and size of your ammo reserves that you purchase with cash acquired from beating enemies or doing side content. Level five takes all this away (and, to be fair, it makes sense, plus this resets in level two as well.) However, the fifth level is a good deal harder than the others, so dying faster and running out of ammo much more quickly can grate. This level is also pretty decent, but it probably has the most confusing level design in the whole game, all while its concept doesn’t really make much sense.

The worst part is that the level pads itself with constant enemy waves every time you do anything. A big part of the level is set in small rooms and narrow corridors, but it loves to spawn multiple mechs (including grenade mechs) in them, where there’s little room to manoeuvre and it’s easy to run low on ammo. By the end, Beyond Sunset throws wall-to-wall fights at you to the point of monotony. The last level has you kill nearly 4,000 enemies alone and I was very ready for the game to be over at this point.

Then there was a final boss battle against one of the spongiest bosses I’ve ever seen. It’s far from a hard boss, so the trade-off is that it takes too long, has way more health than it needs, and does tons and tons of damage. Its attacks are pretty easy to dodge, but if they end up hitting you, you’ll get melted pretty fast. It was a tedious way to end a pretty dull level. Combined with a cliché story that kind of feels like a waste of time, some of my feelings on the game did a 180 by the end.

I do like Beyond Sunset overall, but I do think it’s a shame that the quality kept declining. The gameplay is generally fun, the visuals are excellent, and some of the levels can be a blast. With that said, it’s a very uneven experience that seems to get less compelling as it goes. If you want a creative, unique boomer shooter, I can certainly recommend it at its low price (especially with its launch week discount,) but I’d just want anyone considering that to know that it starts out a lot stronger than it ends.

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