Star Overdrive

I’ve always enjoyed the nature of open world games. You’re given some objectives, but how and when you complete those objectives are up to you. You can go full speed ahead and complete them as soon as possible, or you can take your time, perform some other tasks to better prepare for your main objective, and tackle it when you’re indeed more prepared.

The game that comes to mind when I think of that is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and by extension Tears of the Kingdom), and that was certainly on my mind when I checked out Star Overdrive.

In Star Overdrive, Bios has been stranded on a distant alien planet with only his hoverboard and Keytar at his side. He must use his Keytar to defeat the enemies he encounters and solve puzzles with various abilities he finds along the way, as well as pick up resources to improve the abilities of his hoverboard.

On the surface, using a hoverboard to traverse an alien planet while smashing enemies with a Keytar sounds crazy, but I can wholly get behind that concept. Concept alone doesn’t make a great game, but execution can certainly help. So let’s see how well Star Overdrive executes Bios’s Keytar and hoverboard abilities.

Graphically speaking, the alien world looks great and you’ll soon see the Breath of the Wild inspiration at work as you’re limited to where you can go. As you explore the starting area you’ll see a tower that requires a few tasks to be completed to activate. This opening area will allow you to get acclimated to Star Overdrive’s mechanics, namely how to traverse the planet on the hoverboard and perform tricks to boost for a few moments.

As you progress you’ll unlock several abilities such as being able to grapple objects and enemies, fire off several red impulses to attack enemies and hit switches, and creating a jump pad to help traverse larger areas you normally couldn’t. As you gain these abilities the world around you will begin to open up and become more accessible. You’ll also find skill points you can use to improve your overshield and Keytar to help you survive against the other inhabitants of the planet.

One key mechanic of Star Overdrive is customizing and upgrading your hoverboard. While you can find some cosmetic options lying around the planet, finding a workbench will allow you to upgrade your hoverboard, create new parts, and upgrade its stats. To do this you must find materials which are in abundance on the planet. Once at the workstation you’ll dump whatever materials you want into it, choose which part you want to make (engine, booster, wings, plates, and bouncers), pay the required cost, and you’re good to go.

Before finalizing your upgrade you can see how your choices will impact the hoverboard’s stats and can see what the recommended stats are for the area you’re in. That can lead to a bit of frustration when it comes to upgrading the hoverboard.

Each area has different recommended specs. If you don’t pay attention, put in lower grade materials, or choose the wrong part, you might not have enough of a particular stat to help you with that area’s objectives. This is especially true for the races and time trials since those rely on speed and boost.

The good news is that materials are all over the place. Softer materials are found along the ground in various parts of each area, while the enemies you defeat will have harder and rarer materials. However, it can be kind of easy to become “stuck” to where you need to upgrade your hoverboard in a specific way to help complete an objective and move on.

While even early on you may have a few different objectives you can take on in any order, some may be in areas where your stats are nowhere near what’s recommended, and the one area where your stats are closer to the recommended ones you might struggle with something like a race or time trial which requires you to basically have full knowledge of the layout of the current area.

Something else I noticed with the abilities you get is that while you’re initially told how they work, there’s the occasional situation where they have to be used in a way that you’d think wouldn’t work given the mechanics. Without going into spoiler territory, if you have the grapple ability selected and hold down the button for it, you’ll grab an object but will drop it as soon as you let go of the button.

During an early game boss fight you have to grab onto the boss with that ability, but then switch to another ability to attack the boss when you get close. It took me a solid 10 minutes before figuring that out. Normally when you let go of the button you’re using to use the grapple ability, you let go. Plus you can’t swap abilities when using one. But during this boss fight it was the complete opposite. So, naturally I got stuck there for a while. Basically, if you get stuck, try everything, even if you don’t think it should work.

The only other nitpick I have beyond that is getting a game over. Granted, game overs happen in most games but with Star Overdrive, it’s kind of an unnecessary hindrance. To explain it better, when you fall into a pit or drown in water (before you have ways to cross deep water) you’ll get a game over screen, have to press A, and the game will just put you back on the last piece of solid ground you were on for the most part. It basically just takes about 10 to 15 seconds to go right back to where you were, as opposed to just the screen briefly fading to black and back into the action.

That I started getting used to—until I finally died by getting hit too many times and my shield and energy being depleted. I figured it’d set me back a ways from where I was at. But after hitting A at the game over screen, it literally put me at the exact spot where I died with any enemies I defeated staying defeated. There seems to be no penalty at all for dying. At that point, I was starting to wonder why there’s even a game over screen to start with if you just wake up right where you died.

Those are just some minor nitpicks though. Star Overdrive isn’t a game where you can just easily go to an objective, complete it, move onto the next, and so on. Much like other open world games, Star Overdrive encourages you to take your time to explore the world around you, gather up materials, customize your hoverboard to suit your playstyle, and not to rush things. There is the issue of making sure to customize your board to help complete your objectives and once you use materials to craft a new part, there’s no getting those materials back without going out and gathering them up again.

Star Overdrive is an enjoyable game but it can get a bit tedious at times. Grinding materials for upgrading the hoverboard isn’t all that bad. Once you get about an hour or so in, you’ll have ways to cross over to other parts of the planet to explore and obtain better materials. The tedium comes in when upgrading the board itself and knowing how to make and upgrade the parts you need.

Beyond that though, the developers did a really good job with the open world experience and if you get stuck in one area, there’s a chance that you can just go to another area and work on it. If you enjoy open world games, Star Overdrive should scratch that itch and keep you busy for quite a while.