You play Bios, a young man of indeterminate age. He’s off wandering the cosmos in his own spaceship, looking for his lost love, Nous. Finding a distress call from her, you rush to an alien planet to figure out what’s happened to her as she’s been missing for seven years it seems. That’s a rather long time, especially considering the apparent ages of both Bios and Nous, but honestly, all you really need to know is that they’re lovers and Bios is trying to find her.
Considering that Bios has just been hanging out in space playing video games and dressing like an early 90s teenager, it doesn’t seem like things are all that pressing but once you land on the planet, you’ll find Nous’ hoverboard and get searching for her. She’s conveniently left a number of cassette tapes (yes, you read that right) all over the planet as journals and you can find them and toss them into your space Walkman a la Guardians of the Galaxy to find out more background on what’s going on. You’ll have to piece things together as you go though, since it seems like you’re the only human on the planet. There are plenty of bases and mines about but the people are all missing, which doesn’t bode well for your girlfriend.
Star Overdrive is an open-world game and you can travel all over the landscape on foot (so slow!) and your hoverboard. Zipping along from place to place on the board is fairly easy, though the fine detail required for more challenging riding paths is difficult until you start upgrading your board. The concept is particularly interesting as the game almost feels like two different games in one, one where you sail about pulling tricks with the right stick to boost your board when it lands and one where you’re on foot, exploring ruins and fighting off the occasional alien monster while you gather resources in order to jazz up your ride, both with modifications and slick new paint jobs. Eventually you’ll bond with the AI in your board, allowing you to modify its behavior and have it work independently for you with a variety of options available from the menu system.
If things sound a bit vague here overall, it’s because Star Overdrive itself feels a bit vague. Sure, you come across some tapes and board upgrades that Nous has hidden randomly in places that they really shouldn’t have survived for years, but by and large the entire landscape is nearly empty and so are the mines. Combat is sparse at best and not all that challenging once you find the quickest patterns to defeat each enemy, often guided by either explicit game prompts or by the most recent power-up you’ve found. Wandering from abandoned site to abandoned site becomes somewhat repetitive after a few hours and while the puzzles to activate each drill and complete each mine area are somewhat interesting, none are particularly challenging. Star Overdrive never really holds your hand however, so you’ll have to explore on your own and figure out what to do in most cases. There are some key points that you have to investigate but even that is left fairly open so players used to a more guided modern experience may struggle at first until they lock in to the flow of the game.
Speaking of how quiet levels are, the mines are interesting, very similar to the shrines in Breath of the Wild. They have a Zelda-esque feel to them as well, with massive environments that can only be passed through by completing a series of puzzles typically tied to a special ability you have recently acquired. While some are more challenging than others, each leads you through a series of puzzles and a handful of enemies, often new for each mine. While interesting, they do tend to really slow the pacing of the game however, forcing you to stop and think rather than using some of the skills required to sail your board around the planet. Once you start a mine you can’t leave until it’s finished and your board’s drive module is locked up in the entry gate so you’ll have to solve it whether you like it or not (yay autosave!). Mines give you additional boosts to permanent stats and abilities in the menu system though and you’ll need those extra bonuses to progress.
Activate enough abandoned gear and you’ll have to use your hoverboard to race from checkpoint to checkpoint to fully re-power the systems for some reason. Why any self-respecting engineer would design a system where timed races are required to get the system running again after a power failure is honestly unfathomable however. Star Overdrive guides you from checkpoint to checkpoint in each race with glowing green lights that are visible from anywhere. Doing tricks on your board will allow you to boost and speed up your races so that you can zip through each checkpoint and once the race is complete, equipment powers up and the main story continues. Boost into the red and pulla trick though and you’ll take a spill, losing momentum and tumbling comically. Make sure to pay particular attention to the power expectations for races. Those recommendations (on a radar chart) are essential for effectively completing each mission and without them you’ll absolutely struggle.
To do that you’ll need to gather crafting items. There are a variety of crafting items in Star Overdrive, some found in the environment (usually near ruins of some sort or abandoned equipment) and some gathered by defeating enemies. You can boost your item discovery rates with ability points gathered from mines and you’ll need them. Crafting is not very intuitive as you simply pour random items into the crafting container and pack as much in as possible, then craft an item for your board with them. The more you pack in and the stronger or rarer the items are, the better the crafted item becomes, enhancing your speed, boost power, and a number of other stats. The game gives almost no guidance for this aside from the radar charts so use the direction their pointing to choose which upgrades to focus on. Sadly, they’re not visible from the menu system so you’ll have to pay attention to know where to focus your upgrades. Don’t upgrade your board at random or you’ll end up farming crafting components for a while just to get the upgrades you need to complete a mission.
There are hunts and boss fights in Star Overdrive too. Hunts are for strange sandworm style creatures that you can latch onto and surf behind, slowly plinking them down until you defeat them and harvest rare materials for your hoverboard from its corpse. There are quite a few around and they’re definitely an interesting diversion. Boss fights are more intense with massive monsters or tech and even the occasional quick time event (don’t worry, not bad ones) where you’ll have to figure out how to beat them old-school style. They’re definitely exciting fights, though the mechanics aren’t that complex. Considering how few fights you get to have most of the time in the early game, every boss fight is definitely a treasure here!
You’ll also find additional powers that Nous discovered on the planet and embedded in special cassettes left behind in some areas. These cassettes allow you to do things like bounce yourself into the air to do tricks and solve puzzles, magnetically grab enemies and objects a la BotW, and fire homing bullets amongst other powers. These additional powers slowly unlock as you progress through the story and allow you to access new areas and fight new types of enemies. Some of them are vitally important to racing as well, so make sure you master each power as you gain them! Some even have some ethical concerns surrounding them, but you’ll have to decide how comfortable you are with those issues as Nous herself expresses her misgivings in a message to you.
One thing that Star Overdrive is absolutely brimming with is style. This is an incredibly cool looking game, taking cel shading to a whole new level. With designs vaguely reminiscent of 2021’s Sable and some clear influences in both pop culture and comic book art, the game looks absolutely stunning. The way landscapes spread out is breathtaking and blasting through them and falling down from heights at high speed on your hoverboard looks amazing every time. Add in the ‘80s/’90s stylized outfits and tech along with some nifty aliens and you’ve got a unique experience that’s constantly engaging from a visual standpoint.
Sadly, the music does not match the excellent visuals of the game. For a game this stylized, music adds a huge amount to the gameplay and immersion and the soundscape is noticeably lacking in Star Overdrive. During combat, excellent guitar riffs and dramatic drums hit while you fight, but as soon as combat ends, quiet soothing strains seep gently into the background of the game and there’s no music direction that really helps you focus your efforts. Mines and exploration of the planet are also noticeably quiet with almost no music to accompany your explorations. Occasionally you’ll find a cassette with a thumping track on it and those songs are undeniably great, but to play them, you’ll have to run them from the menu system and after a single track, things go back to the near silence of the majority of the game. That’s a huge mistake because this is a game that could really benefit from some musical accompaniment to drive plot and direction along, and the tracks included are good and even available via QR code on Spotify and YouTube. The intermittent voice work from the actress playing Nous is quite good too, and it’s a shame that there’s so little overall voice work in the game as what there is is quite compelling.
Pacing is really the main issue with Star Overdrive however. While things initially seem interesting with abandoned facilities and enemies close by your starting point, as you spread out and explore more and more of the planet, the environments feel a bit too empty with too much landscape serving no purpose other than to facilitate jumps and races. Sure there are a smattering of things to find scattered about, but many of them are not particularly motivating or strongly linked to the main storyline of the game (new paint jobs for your board seem particularly pointless). As you continue to play, it’s hard to maintain your interest level as game activities outside of main story elements feel less and less interesting and become more and more repetitive.
That engagement drop makes you take a closer look at the story elements you have actually experienced, especially if you’re exploring for a while, and they start to show through as weaker and less compelling than the initial impact of the game’s excellent design aesthetic. If you pay close attention to upgrades and follow the story instead of just floundering around, the pacing improves however and the game rewards you for some exploration as well (just try not to get too distracted). Depending on your playstyle, Star Overdrive can be fairly exciting or somewhat tedious and there’s a clear direction in how to play despite how open the world is. If you like a lot of additional checkpoint races and pulling tricks, there’s a lot more to love here of course, but that’s not for everyone.
Star Overdrive is a neat concept that ends up being a mixed bag of ideas that don’t fully gel together. While none of them are bad, there’s not as much natural flow between different modes of the game as there could be and the high energy action you’d expect from a game like this one quickly gives way to a more sedate exploration experience that doesn’t seem to fit the edgy and unique designs of the game itself. Following the very subtle recommendations of the game helps but there’s still more grinding for craft materials than perhaps there should be. Add to that a soundtrack that doesn’t keep things all that lively often enough and there are enough flaws that you have to wonder if perhaps Star Overdrive is a bit too ambitious.
The design work is the real star in Star Overdrive with outstanding backgrounds and character designs, but that’s not enough to make the game as successful as its potential. At $35 it’s not a bank breaker though, and there’s more than enough fun to be had if you love painting and racing hoverboards on an alien planet, along with some exploration and resource gathering.
This review is based on a digital copy of Star Overdrive provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Star Overdrive will also available for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.