Star Overdrive review: A stylish adventure of missed opportunities

Upon starting Star Overdrive, I wouldn’t have thought it possible to make a game about hoverboards zipping through open-world, and jamming out on a keytar, this boring. It’s such a shame that beneath this admittedly gorgeous surface lies a clunky and dull adventure lacking in the personality that so lovingly appears through the visuals, yet doesn’t make it down to the bones of the game.

You can see what the developers were going for; Star Overdrive is a sci-fi story channelling The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild which, on paper, sounds brilliant. And there are some steps in the right direction, but it’s all accompanied by a stark lack of personality and character. This is a game that took turns in making me say to myself “Oh, now that’s very cool” to “this is incredibly frustrating.”

Take, for example, the star of the show, the hoverboard. Initially, traversal with the board feels nice. It’s speedy and nimble, zooming along the landscape kicking up a wonderful plume of dust, yet the right stick pulls off stunts for earning boosts, rather than allowing you to control the camera, which results in the hoverboard feeling unwieldy, when it should feel like an extension of your characters body.

Star Overdrive takes you hoverboarding on alien planets

Bios, the hero of this story, has a lovely dodge roll, a rocket-propelled boost for jumping, and a lovely air-dash for reaching new platforms. However, his basic movement feels so floaty and clunky, that it taints the work done in his more acrobatic abilities. Every time I had to explore on-foot, it felt like wading through treacle, and this feeling transfers over to combat, too.

Your trusty keytar acts as a melee weapon, a bit like an energy sword, and there are some delightful visual effects to see when swinging it about the place. But dear me, it is not a fun time. Enemies are repetitive and obnoxious, rather than adventurous to fight, and I often found myself swinging the keytar, only to find my melee whiff right past what I’m trying to hit. There’s no satisfying crunch to combat, no feeling of heft or weight behind anything, it feels like every hit that does land is a tickle, rather than a whomp.

Before I get to the Breath of the Wild-style abilities, I want to return to Bios, our protagonist, and touch on the story of Star Overdrive. The game opens with Bios receiving a communication from his girlfriend Nous, as she’s stranded on the planet of Cebete, where the action takes place. It’s a pretty standard story of hero saves damsel, given a futuristic spin, and as long as you don’t expect something extraordinary, it shifts the game along nicely.

However - and you can probably tell that for every good thing, there’s a bad thing to mention - Bios lacks any kind of charisma or charm, he’s a cardboard cutout with a hoverboard, devoid of any substance that would elevate the story. No humour, no drama, just moves from point A to point B.

Dear Villagers

Now, along the way, Bios will need to solve environmental puzzles, and to do this he will use abilities picked up through dungeon-style areas. The first of these is the ability to pick up heavy objects and manipulate them - great in fights, I’ll add - and as you use these abilities a metre ticks down, draining energy. This is replenished through fighting, or boosting when riding the hoverboard.

The second ability is an energy beam weapon that flicks switches, or damages enemies; the third is a bounce pad you can materialise on the ground beneath you, creating for some epic platforming. Pretty much all the abilities are fun to use, if you can accept that most of them accompany the issues I’ve mentioned above. It’s great to use the object grabbing to pick up an enemy and hurl them at another, but you’ll quickly run out of juice and have to resort to the underwhelming keytar.

The core challenges of Star Overdrive also lack inspiration seen elsewhere. Much of the adventure consists of speeding over to one place to hit some switches, turn on a machine, and fight a few enemies. Occasionally this is broken up by flashes of greatness, like the early huge sandworm boss that pulls you along, while you fire energy beams at it, creating some lovely cinematic moments, but these are few and far between.

The upgrading of the hoverboard is also a nice touch, as you use materials found throughout the world, or via killing enemies, and put them all in a big pot. The better the materials, the better the equipment at the end. Once you’ve lobbed in everything you’ve found, you choose a hoverboard part to create, spend some odd green pyramid currency, and you get a component to equip. Use rubbish materials, and you won’t see much improvement, choose some juicy ingredients, like boss items, and you’ve got a suped-up hoverboard that improves stats, or allows for traversal across water or special surfaces, opening up parts of the planet.

Dear Villagers

With every step forward in the adventure, you can see what is being attempted, and there are some terrific ideas here, however, after a few hours I was so frustrated or bored that any flicker of great design was overwhelmed by annoyances.

Let me give another example; in the ‘dungeon’ where you get the bounce pad ability, there’s a point where Bios needs to build momentum by jumping from higher points to gain height. Fine, there I am placing bounce pads and leaping into the air. Wheeeee!

I finally reach where I need to be, and two obnoxious enemies are waiting to fight, and I’ve got barely any energy left to fight them. They then proceed to knock me off the platform - the enemies hit an energy shield around Bios which creates a weird bouncing effect - and I’m back to square one, having to traverse the area all over again.

Suddenly, all the fun of bouncing, and chaining together genuinely brilliant traversal of air-dashes, bounces, and boost jumps, is undone by poor enemy design. It’s maddening.

There’s a word that was developed some years ago within this industry, and it’s one I generally hate to use, though it does a great job of describing a problem. That word is ‘jank.’ Star Overdrive is janky, at practically every turn, and where it’s sometimes forgivable, at others it’s like banging your head against a wall. I’m all for games that have a little jank, it gives them an odd charm, and some players will overlook this because in various areas, this game has some truly great ideas, but if you can’t look past that, this game will ultimately let you down.

What frustrates me the most, is I really wanted to love Star Overdrive. I wrote about it for a little news story, highlighting how good it looked - honestly, the visual design is simply lush. The trailers sold me on a joyous adventure balancing combat and exploration, and I ended up wishing for more, and feeling sadly disappointed.

Pros: Occasional flashes of greatness, decent abilities and puzzles, lush visuals

Cons: Clunky, lacks personality, lacklustre combat, frustrating design choices

For fans of: Zelda, Hi-Fi Rush, Jet Set Radio

5/10: Average

Star Overdrive is available 10 April on Nintendo Switch (version tested), PlayStation 5, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.