Star Overdrive (Review)

 

Written By: Sam Delong-Let’s get this out of the way right now — Star Over Drive is awesome. This hoverboard action game is dripping with cool vibes and sci-fi style, leaving me grinning from ear to ear during my entire playthrough. Star Over Drive visuals boast a wallpaper-worthy visual flair, reminiscent of a watercolor painting. It uses a minimalist style in its presentation and storytelling, leaving the player to focus on its fun and addictive gameplay. The game’s story gets going after Bios, your white-haired protagonist, finds his hoverboard.

While the board aids in traversal, it can also be switched from your back to your feet, seamlessly transitioning from a jetpack to a flying skateboard on the fly. The hack-and-slash gameplay is fun, albeit simple. However, the simple move sets keep the action going, never slowing down the pace it needs to be fun. You blaze past enemies and skyrocket off ramps and jumps, and doing tricks in the air will also give you a speed boost.

Your hoverboard can also be upgraded and customized, and includes some pretty cool cosmetic options. The gear option for your board is surprisingly deep as well, and you can tweak everything from your engine to the wings on the back.

Occasionally, Bios will have to venture into some deep underground dungeons as you collect power cores to progress further. These areas are big and expansive, and are some of the highlights of the game’s excellent soundtrack, with an appropriately haunting score. It’s an intentional choice, as the dungeons have you doing so without the aid of your board.

If I have one complaint about the game, some of the platforming can be clunky in the dungeons. Bios isn’t able to automatically grab ledges, which can lead to missed jumps or just falling off things that break the flow of the puzzles. A minor gripe, but one that we hope will be addressed in the future.

Star Over Drive is an excellent adventure — it pays tribute to other games like Hi-Fi Rush, Brutal Legend, Kingdom Hearts, and the more recent Zelda games — in a way that evokes the fun of those games with a style all its own. It harkens back to when 3-D platformers and action games had a charm that only exists in video games.

4 out of 5