Star Overdrive Review

Star Overdrive is an action-adventure title developed by Caracal Games, and it has left me feeling unbelievably mixed.

The main selling point here, and the game's best system, is the hoverboard. Nearly as soon as you begin the game, you’re given it, and are then sent out into the world. It’s your primary means of traversal throughout the game, and it’s an absolute blast to use. The world design mostly lends itself incredibly well to that goal. There are boost gates regularly strewn around the world, along with a lot of sand dunes and places to jump off, which allows you to perform tricks and gather more energy to maintain high speeds. The pace feels fantastic; it’s thrilling, but with an almost zen-like feeling once you get into the groove.

The hoverboard also gives you access to races, timed collectibles and even has its uses in combat once you increase the bond stat through progression throughout the game, but that’s really where my biggest problem comes to light. Alongside the hoverboard-centric content, there’s a far less enjoyable set of content which feels very derivative of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (even down to some sound effects which sound almost identical). Combat takes up some of this, and it’s mostly fine but pretty unremarkable. You utilise the protagonist Bios’ Keytar as a weapon, and initially, it’s simply just light and heavy attacks to deal with enemies. It works fine, but the pace is so much slower than the hoverboard sections, which take up the rest of the time, that it causes some crazy whiplash going back and forth between the two. As you progress, though, you’ll obtain a series of Powers (in the form of special tapes), giving you some unique options for both combat and puzzle-solving.

These Powers can be used and combined in some relatively fun ways, especially for the puzzles, but overall, it isn’t all that interesting. The Powers themselves are pretty one-note, such as being able to charm enemies or pick up and throw both small enemies and objects. They make combat more interesting, but it never fixes the problem with the pacing I mentioned previously.

These issues carry over to the rest of the main content too; you’ll explore mines, which are small puzzle-focused dungeons that reward power cores, the primary resource for upgrading the skill tree. You’ll also be required to collect resources around the map, from killing enemies, looting chests, and gathering them from the ground. Both of these are just a very slow process. The mines often require pretty slow progression, waiting for platforms to move or slowly moving and rotating objects. The puzzles themselves aren’t actually all that bad, but there’s too much of a contrast and lack of originality between those and the hoverboard sections, which are the shining star of this whole game.

Progression is fine, but not all that interesting. The Skill Tree is functionally bland, mostly being filled with small stat increases, such as increased damage, increasing your shield’s defence, and increasing the amount of energy you have for using your powers. It’s not the worst, it’s just boring, and it’s brought down further by the slightly more interesting nodes (aside from the two new attacks) being features I would argue should be given from the start, such as sprinting, and even the ability to fast travel (which feels even worse since the Hoverboard navigation is so much fun that it feels worthless).

The resources you gather also let you create new components for your Hoverboard, increasing its performance in a few key areas. These mainly control how it handles, from its speed and boost to its turning and braking capability. This isn’t a system that I love, but it’s not the worst. It’s hard to really notice any big changes, especially early on, so knowing which components to create seems a little random, and higher quality components are simply a resource sink, so it isn’t particularly interesting to create them either. There are also components that you can find in chests, which are often better than the ones you can craft early on, so it’s hardly worth engaging with the crafting unless you can’t find parts for a specific slot. Some components do also give you special abilities, like the capability to safely ride on certain special environments, such as Water and Metal, but in all fairness, these are just minor roadblocks rather than challenges that feel interesting to overcome.

The story, and the main story progression, is one of, if not my biggest issue with Star Overdrive. You take the role of Bios, who finds a distress signal from his missing lover, Nous. Crashing on the planet of Cebete, you begin exploring and trying to find her, as she has seemingly been dragged into a mess greater than she expected. From the intro, you’re introduced to a few of the game’s core mechanics, such as the Mines and Races, and then are set on a series of incredibly underwhelming missions, slowly uncovering more of the mystery.

The two biggest problems I have here are that Bios is barely even a character, and that many of the actual missions are either the same style of content as the side objectives. To put it bluntly, it’s boring. Every time there’s something of a story moment, Bios simply stands there looking lost, and having to go through a very limited variety of gameplay for this to be the payoff isn’t engaging. It’s also not rewarding mechanically either, so to keep up with the story you’ll be forced to engage with a lot of side objectives to make sure you’re keeping your gear up to snuff, and since some of the progression is locked behind the races, it isn’t really optional, as you’ll slowly become more and more outclassed if you aren’t keeping up.

I actively found myself having the most fun exploring and finding the collectibles, such as the Tapes, which give small bits of information about Nous. I typically don’t bother with collectibles in open-world games, since there’s often a lot of tedium attached to gathering them, but I really can’t overstate how good the Hoverboard feels, and that’s the crux of my problems. The Hoverboard feels great, and everything surrounding it is functional, but massively underwhelming. I really wish that Caracal Games had fleshed the game out around the Hoverboard, rather than it just feeling like an additional mechanic.

The presentation, however, is pretty pleasant, the music is decent, and the visuals look nice. Despite not being fond of Bios as a character, his and, by extension, Nous’ visual designs are good, there’s a nice style to both of them.

As a whole, Star Overdrive was a pretty unfortunate miss for me. Its primary mechanics clashed a little too heavily, and many of them feel a little too derivative and bland to really feel engaging. The Hoverboard is without question its greatest aspect, and I wish they’d focused more on that aspect of the game rather than the plethora of other parts which are simply not much fun to engage with.