While it got overshadowed by a bunch of other stuff, for me the most intriguing announcement at Nintendo’s Indie World and Partner Direct last August was Star Overdrive. The reveal trailer grabbed my attention in a way that no other game did. For some reason, the game gave off a vibe of “Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, but in space”, and its combination of an open world traversable by hoverboard with puzzles and aliens seemed like it would be right up my alley.

Unfortunately, the reality of Star Overdrive is a lot less exciting. It’s not that the game doesn’t deliver on what it promises – you really can swoop around its alien world on a futuristic hoverboard – but, rather, it’s that the whole thing feels a little dull.

A big part of the problem is that the world feels empty and lifeless. You can go huge stretches without ever seeing anything to do, and unfortunately the game is perfectly content to give you no hint as to what you’re supposed to do next. While hoverboarding is undeniably cool (at least, it’s cool to any ‘80s kid), the effect wears off pretty quickly when you’re roaming around a dessert, hoping something will pop up on your map and give you a bit of purpose.

Mind you, even that’s not a great approach, since sometimes you stumble across enemies, and combat is where Star Overdrive really falls flat. Even though your main weapon is a key-tar – named, imaginatively, the Keytar – all you do with it is whack away at enemies when they get too close. You get a few more options as new abilities unlock, but I can’t say that any of it made me all that eager to get into fights.

A big part of that, though, was that fighting generally meant getting off your hoverboard and running around on foot – and this, too, is an area where Star Overdrive is lacking. Your character – a generic hero named Bios, trying to save his girlfriend – moves with no grace whatsoever, and once he gets into battles he’s basically locked onto whatever enemy he first attacks, which means that you have no idea if other aliens are coming at you from the side or behind. Occasionally you get to do some light platforming, but even that, where you have your jetpack to allow for double-jumps and mid-air dashing, is made awkward by the fact that Bios doesn’t manoeuvre through the air all that well, and he’s awfully prone to missing platforms and falling all the way back down to the ground.

There are some puzzles, and those fare a little better than combat – but it’d be hard to say they’re really a standout. They’re reminiscent of the dungeons in modern-day Zelda games, except they’re not really all that memorable. Their main purpose seems to be to help you unlock new abilities, and they’re designed in such a linear fashion that you’ll never feel very challenged.

Truthfully, not even hoverboarding is as great as it could be. It has its moments, and it makes doing tricks easy enough, but because Star Overdrive’s alien world is so empty, it’s hard to get that invested in what you’re doing. Not even upgrades – which are incredibly easy to craft, since you can create new parts out of literally everything you pick up – are enough to make your main ride any more exciting.

All of which is to say, Star Overdrive is another example of a game where a cool reveal didn’t live up to the end result. Whatever inspiration there was to be found in last year’s trailer didn’t make it to the finished product, and there’s little here to make the game worth recommending.

Dear Villagers provided us with a Star Overdrive Nintendo Switch code for review purposes.

Score: 6

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