Fantastic But Flawed Action Adventure!
I absolutely love developers who have a vision for something unique and just go for it. It is quite clear that Caracal Games has enormous talent within their studio, but the weight of their ambition is also what drags their wonderful game, Star Overdrive, down from a height it deserves.
The best part of this game is the opening hour. From there on, once you get the idea of what the game is about, small details and issues start to chip away at the initial “Wow” you experience.
You play as a young man in his spaceship who receives a distress call from a nearby planet. It is from your girlfriend that you received this call for help. You enter the planet’s atmosphere, only to be shot down and crash land. Once you recover yourself and a couple of items, including your hoverboard and “keytar”, you set off into this vast, beautiful world.
You are soon introduced to the game’s three main aspects: traversal on your hoverboard, combat with your keytar, and puzzle rooms. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly!
The Good is by far the best aspect, that being the traversal on the hoverboard. The sense of speed, freedom, and downright fun getting from one place to another made using the board an absolute pleasure. If you speed over a small rise, you gain height, which with a simple button press, can then give you the chance to perform tricks that, when you land, gives you a boost of speed.
Given the small processing power of the Switch and the vast landscapes you are in, I thought the console would struggle with this, but I never saw a bit of screen tear or frame rate drop. The board itself is also a tad difficult to control, but with upgrades, it can become faster and easier to handle.
The Bad part of the game is the puzzle rooms. They are very reminiscent of the tombs in The Legend of Zelda games but on a much smaller, less confident scale. What makes them bad is not the puzzles themselves but the game’s inability to be accurate. For example, the very first room will have you moving large items to form steps to be able to climb. Moving them isn’t a problem and is actually quite fun. Making a jump on top of them to gain height is unnecessarily difficult as your character doesn’t cast a shadow, so it’s hard to see exactly where he is going to land.
This is also a problem out in the world as there are objects to climb, which at times are narrow, and falling off these can result in the player’s death.
The Ugly part of the game, although I feel like I am being a little harsh here, is the combat. The reason for this is that there is very little nuance to combat other than a basic combo and dodge to use pretty much all game long with the keytar or some of the other features you acquire, like the aforementioned ability to move large objects. Even in boss fights, you can spam the same method for the entire fight, which cheapens the experience quite a lot.
For example, there are general animals around the land that you could fight with your keytar, much like a sword, but the gravity tether you acquire very soon can also pick them up and throw them, which makes combat ridiculously simple. I actually tried to use the sword more to give myself some sense of challenge, but even that became repetitive quite quickly.
To add to this are the game upgrades. For your character, there are too few; for your hoverboard, too many! Much like the rest of the experience, there just isn’t a good balance.
However, even the presentation of Star Overdrive is a mixed bag. The game does have an outstanding amount of presentation in both the visuals and soundtrack, but it sorely lacks any in-game atmosphere to make the world feel alive. The visuals, especially the artwork, is fantastic. With such a grand vista and a large world to explore, it’s very easy to be captivated by what you are looking at, but…(you knew there was going to be a but there), once you start exploring, and when you travel to places, you realize how devoid the actual world is of anything to make it sound alive. You could stand in a lot of locations to actual silence.
Then, however, when there are battles, the game’s soundtrack kicks in with some excellent guitar rock music, along with a lightsaber-ish noise when swinging your sword. It’s getting details like these correct that will elevate a game from average to good.
Lastly, we have the story, or what little there is of it. Normally, I enthuse about how important it is for a story to be captivating, and here it is quite clearly nothing more than a means to an end. The real story here is the actual journey and traversal around the world, which gets you to a broadcast for more information, then off again to find another one.
Summary
It’s quite clear that the studio had a fantastic vision for a game they wanted to make, and they have made a game that has some stellar aspects. The weight of that ambition to include other elements, however, drags it down. In hindsight, if they hadn’t had the budget to put the effort into the combat, they should have just focused the game on traversal (in the same way as the games Journey or Abzu do) for what could have been an incredible experience.
As it stands, Star Overdrive is a solid effort with a lot of merit and promise. Some polishing here and there would have made it better, but it would be interesting to see any future games focused on what made part of this game thrilling: the hoverboard.
Developer: Caracal Games
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Platforms: Nintendo Switch/Steam
Release Date: 10th April 2025
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Star Overdrive was provided by the publisher.
