Star Overdrive Review – Review
Star Overdrive looked very impressive when it appeared at the Nintendo Partner Showcase in August of last year. A cross between Tony Hawk, Ratchet & Clank and even with some Breath of the Wild flavor spiced in, the vibe felt reminiscent of old-school GameCube era action games. However, playing Star Overdrive feels more like a chore than a rebellious action. Its empty world, hollow combat and excessive grinding (not on rails) feels like the fat should’ve been trimmed or could’ve been more focused in execution.
As Bios you receive a distress signal from a planet where your girlfriend has gone missing. The landing turns into a crash as you’re stranded on this mysterious planet filled with sandy dunes, ancient curved structures, and the remains of a drilling operation with a vanished crew. Only equipped with a keytar and hoverboard you set out to figure out what happened to the mining operation and solve the secrets of the planet. Gameplay is pretty straightforward. Using your hoverboard you can speed around the wastelands, performing tricks to gain speed and ultimately find waypoints that lead to segmented puzzle arenas. The game has a nice visual palette, making the similar looking vistas feel colorful and enticing to explore. The sense of movement feels good, as your hoverboard can also be used to glide and dash through platforming challenges. These are often signposted by the segmented arenas where you’ll need to complete a challenge in order to turn on powerlines, gain new abilities or unlock watchtowers to progress in the story.
This is unfortunately where the game fell apart for me. In terms of the core loop it got too stale for me too quickly. While movement can feel good, far too often I found myself quickly losing control over my hoverboard and crashing straight into the ground. Being unable to complete challenges in time and having to attempt these over and over again made for a frustrating experience. Especially because the game is forcing players down a very specific path, gathering components that can be crafted into specific upgrades for the hoverboard. In a sense, it’s a scavenging game, where defeating certain types of enemies can yield certain rewards. Soft, hard, tech, and alien resources come in differing values and each can increase the stats of the hoverboard. Adding wings makes the board easier to maneuver in the air and a better booster increases the speed gained from doing tricks. So after grinding I found myself back on the board and still needed to throw myself over and over again at these similar feeling challenges. Racing through hoops across the wasteland got especially tedious as the same music started pounding my ears. For a game that uses a keytar, cassette tapes and specially written music tracks, the soundtrack feels drab and boring. The aesthetics scream Hi-Fi Rush, but the feeling while playing lacks the excitement one may expect from a skating game.
The combat in particular fails to make an impact. A simple button masher, where you can dodge and counter if you time your attacks right, but just whacking away deals with the majority of enemies. In particular after you unlock special abilities. In a similar vein to Breath of the Wild you can unlock permanent abilities that drain a meter to do different things inside combat and for exploring the overworld. One power lets you grab and toss objects and another shoots projectiles at opponents from a distance. There’s a few puzzles that require the use of these, but none feel particularly satisfying to solve. You’d think that combat with a Keytar would be more engaging, but fighting enemies feels like a chore. Even the boss battles, that make use of the massive open space, feel too floaty and too much like a set-piece to really make an impact. I never felt connected to the world of Star Overdrive and could feel the game creaking underneath its high ambitions.
One of those ambitions is perhaps in its performance. At times it feels incredibly smooth and locked at a stable framerate. Which is impressive for a game of this size. But then I am blazing through this open space and it just means nothing. Jumps feel unresponsive and making speed can drop like a stone once you try to board uphill against a metal structure, which is far too often required. The objects are there, but there’s no impact. There’s no feel in the animation that sells me on the exploration, on the combat or on the world that Star Overdrive is trying to build. In chasing performance and ideas from better games, too often it is like Star Overdrive hasn’t figured out its own identity. The ambitions and the inspirations are clear, but Star Overdrive isn’t adding anything to the conversation outside of “wasn’t riding a shield in Breath of the Wild exhilarating?”.
It’s clear that the team behind Star Overdrive is very talented and ambitious in their craft. The visuals make for an enticing world and there is a great feel for what makes a good movement mechanic. But it all comes together in the final game as a clunky project with too many influences and too little of its own. I am mostly disappointed in Star Overdrive because I can see the gem of a good game that was there and it just doesn’t come to fruition. Even if the performance was more consistent and the animation was a bit more polished, there is very little to the loop here that makes Star Overdrive a good recommendation
