Star Overdrive - Switch Review

Seeing Star Overdrive getting shown off at a Nintendo Direct many months ago filled me with a lot of excitement. “This game looks amazing! I can’t wait to fly around at subsonic speeds doing sick tricks on a hoverboard on an alien planet while sick 80s-style rock music plays!” I thought as I waited impatiently for a review code. But let me tell you, what I got was far different than what I was expecting.

The Good

Star Overdrive’s art style is breathtaking. The character designs are fun, being heavily inspired by 80s retro futuristic tech similar to Star-Lord from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Having that mixed in with the sprawling sand dunes of a now deserted alien planet with the destroyed remnants of the civilisation that once lived there makes for one heck of a skate park and a beautifully eye-catching aesthetic.

Accompanying Star Overdrive’s 80s retro-futuristic aesthetic is its soundtrack. The music hits you with a lot of wailing guitars and heavy synth, perfectly encapsulating the vibes of 80s rock as you blast your way through sand dunes, getting sick air and doing some gnarly tricks on your hoverboard.

Speaking of the hoverboard, it's really where Star Overdrive’s gameplay shines. The hoverboard is fast but not too fast that you can’t control it; jumping off ramps and doing tricks mid-air give you a boost of speed when you land, like kart racing games tend to do. Just going around and exploring the world is immensely fun because it just kinda happens as a result of messing around, going fast and doing sick tricks.

TL;DR

• Incredible art design
• Perfectly captures the feel of 80s rock
• Immaculate hoverboard controls

The Bad

Now we get into the real disappointing part: all the cool stuff I mentioned about the hoverboard is only like 5% of the overall game. Most of your time is spent on foot in dungeons solving puzzles. On top of that, the controls while on foot are really odd; you are permanently locked into a strafing motion, making the game feel like it has faux tank controls and the game expects you to do platforming like this!?

Star Overdrive also has combat, which is abysmal. The enemies are such damage sponges that after fighting the first enemy I came across, I just decided to skip every non-mandatory fight sequence I came across. While yes, you can increase your overall damage to make combat smoother, you can only do so by such a small amount each time you finish a puzzle dungeon. Doing these dungeons just to make the combat suck less isn’t a reward.

Star Overdrive also has a crafting system for hoverboard upgrades but boy is it lacklustre. Instead of finding specific materials for crafting recipes, you just grab everything you can find, dump it into a machine, select what stat for the hoverboard you want the upgrade to boost and then it spits out the part. The first time I did this, I put around 50-60 materials into the machine only for it to make a part that upgraded my hoverboard’s speed by 0.2%. I’ve never felt more disappointed in my life.

Despite Star Overdrive’s fantastic soundtrack, there's really not a lot of sound in the game. While yes, you are exploring an abandoned planet, which is supposed to feel empty, the game feels unintentionally empty. Most sound effects are just nonexistent; one character gets voice acting and it's not the protagonist; and the music comes in only during action sequences, which, if you recall the previous paragraph, I skipped due to them being a slog to play.

TL;DR

• The actual fun part of the game is only a small fraction of the overall gameplay
• Abysmal combat
• Lazily tacked on crafting system
• Unintentionally empty feeling with little sound

Final Score: 4/10

Star Overdrive’s advertisement led me to believe the game was something akin to Airblade meets Tony Hawk Pro Skater but what I got was a poor excuse for a Ubisoft sandbox game and I’m very upset about it. More power to you if you enjoy these kinds of games but I have been sick of them for around 15 years. It really feels like the dev team wanted to make a cool hoverboard game, got around a third of the way through production and just decided to turn it into Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Thank you for checking out our Star Overdrive Switch review, thank you to Plug In Digital (via JF Games PR) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• NintenVania Podcast
• RedHero