Star Overdrive

I was immediately excited about Star Overdrive when it landed in my inbox. That excitement continued when I loaded up this promising sci-fi adventure, as I was greeted by some brilliantly stylised visuals before landing in a vast open space, ready to explore with my trusty hoverboard. Well, the hoverboard our character BIOS gifted to NOUS, the girl he's searching for within this quest.

Heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild and other open-world sandbox experiences, Star Overdrive takes the formula of an open world free for you to explore at your own pace and adds a hoverboard to it. That might not sound like a lot, but it essentially adds a traversal element similar in style and polish to the swinging of Marvel's Spider-Man and brings it to to your journey. You won't be spending hours walking from point A to point B, as instead you can jump from sand dune to sand dune, boosting your way across the red and tan plains making up the vast majority of the world.

As in Breath of the Wild, Star Overdrive has an overworld, and smaller underground segments where you'll gain powers such as a short, ranged attack, the ability to grab objects with telekinesis, and jump pads you can place on the ground. These abilities will allow you to navigate the underground puzzle areas, essentially acting as shrines, hiding upgrades for your character and board. They're well-crafted additions to the main adventure, forcing you to pause for just the right amount of time before finding out the solution. Not too simple, but not frustrating to the point you want to give up and just search for a guide online.

Where I found the puzzles of the underground - alongside the towers and drills dotted around the map - to be fun and rewarding to explore, I can't really say the same of the map as a whole. Star Overdrive's map is rather large, and lacks variety in its design. The mix of desert and red foliage is a decent visual, but as you sail through it for hours on your hoverboard you welcome the change of scenery in the underground segments. The same visual helps the map feel small despite its size, and the sense of scale is only lowered by the lacking extra elements within the overworld. The hoverboard grants you a sense of speed, yes, especially when you upgrade it, but does the speed really matter if I'm still, bouncing from dune to dune for an extended period of time to reach my next objective? Travelling in Breath of the Wild and especially Tears of the Kingdom never felt like a chore, whereas I can't say the same in Star Overdrive.

And that's a shame, really, because the hoverboard is well-designed. It starts off fairly weak, but still boosting around the map and doing tricks in the air is a lot of fun. Then, as you find more materials, it can be more exciting to upgrade than your own character. The upgrades for your hoverboard largely rely on you gathering materials from enemies and the flora in the overworld, then combining them with a part you'll find underground to enhance a certain aspect of your board, from its speed to its balance. I didn't find the hoverboard too tricky to control at first, but by the time I'd added some parts, it was a dream to ride.

The hoverboard really is the peak of Star Overdrive, which in a way is good, because it's kind of the selling point here, but it also makes the rest of the game feel like extra, needless fat. The combat, for example, feels like something that doesn't really belong, outside of the boss fights against massive monsters that - you guessed it - make use of the hoverboard. Using a keytar (keyboard & guitar), you can slap enemies about with simple combos as the holographic instrument makes a fitting sci-fi "thwum" sound. The kind of noise you and your friends would make when pretending to be Jedi and Sith in your back garden. Unfortunately for Star Overdrive, I think that those imaginary games had better fights. Attacks feel weightless despite the sound effects, enemies barely react, and you never really feel like you or the space hedgehog you're fighting can be bothered to get involved. It's stage combat, in a sense, and it made me want to avoid combat as much as possible.

It didn't help that in almost every combat encounter I faced the game reminded me I could do a heavy attack and air attacks. I couldn't find an option to turn this tutorial off, and it broke up an already rhythmless combat encounter. I'd imagine these overbearing tutorials aren't intended, as I had done my fair share of heavy and air attacks by the time they were still popping up, but it doesn't make them any less frustrating.

Star Overdrive largely feels like a good demo of a great game. There are some really strong core elements like the hoverboard travel, the mysterious story, and the visual style, but these are equally countered by the negatives. The sandbox structure of Star Overdrive seems to work against it, only serving to hide the positives and make the lifeless map and combat stick out like a bit of green in its red and tan world.