Love makes people do crazy things. This is certainly the case for Star Overdrive’s punkish protagonist Bios, who has been cruising through space trying to find the whereabouts of his missing girlfriend Nous – with the two sharing a passion for loud music. After picking up a distress signal, Bios wastes no time in landing on a planet filled with hostile creatures, dusty deserts, and the hazardous remains of a failed mining expedition. Despite having a large area to cover, it isn’t long until Bios finds traces of Nous, including music tapes and slightly suggestive photographs. What a tease.
First released on Switch in April, this open-world adventure now makes its way to PS5, Xbox Series and PC with the obligatory resolution and performance increases, along with haptic feedback for the PS5 version. It’s worth noting that on Xbox Series X the sound is currently muffled and distorted, which is something that’ll hopefully be patched. I can’t say if this is the case for PS5 and PC versions. Thanks to its fresh style it it doesn’t look drastically out of place on these more powerful systems, although there are telling signs of its roots.
Zelda: Breath of the Wild provides the bulk of inspiration, and perhaps a touch of Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising too. A world filled with sand dunes and rolling hills is presented before you, complete with towers to climb that give an overview of the busywork to undertake in the surrounding areas. This includes puzzle focused shrines, roaming bosses to track down, chests to discover, checkpoint and time trial races to win, and copious alien resources to gather. It isn’t long into the proceedings that Bios also learns of coordinates leading to fractured orbs, duly spread across the furthest reaches of the map, and essentially forming the storyline’s backbone.
What sets Star Overdrive apart from its peers – other than the musical theme, with Bios attacking enemies using a keytar – is the ability to whizz around on a hoverboard. This allows great distances to be covered quickly, helping to give a positive first impression. Tricks can be performed for a speed boost, and by visiting a workshop it can not only be customised with decals by also upgraded. The upgrade system is one of the more nuanced features, requiring a hefty amount of resources which must be added accordingly, with each improving (or in some cases decreasing) stats. There’s also the requirement to choose which board components to improve, although it is possible to opt for a recommended choice. Fail to make smart decisions, and you may find yourself unable to win races due to a lack of power – with some races linked to missions.
There’s a need to seek rarer gravity-altering resources, as this will let the hoverboard travel over water and along twisty pipelines. This idea is downplayed somewhat, even though it’s used as a means to gate off later areas. It also doesn’t help with the sense of progression that it’s easy to get off track and into areas not intended to be explored yet, despite being able to pick up missions in that location. A trek to gather resources outside the main area caused quite a bit of frustration early on, partly due to the lack of guidance and handholding. This isn’t a game afraid to let players work things out for themselves – something especially true of reaching new areas.
Shrines offer a slight change in pace, as here Bios must travel on foot. These are centred around puzzle solving, with some being multi-layered, consequently taking a while to beat. New abilities are often given as a reward, many of which are physics based, such as the ability to grab and throw objects, fire projectiles, and deploy bounce pads. What’s neat is that most of these serve multiple purposes, used not just in traversal and puzzle solving, but also during combat. Enemies can be thrown at one another, while bounce pads will send them skyrocketing. Later, the hoverboard becomes a drone and can be set to defend, distract, or attack – including the ability to hurl the blessed thing directly at foes for a single devastating hit.
But while this all may sound encouraging, combat still has a very loose feel; a clash of fast moving enemies, unavoidable incoming fire, distracting explosions, and lots of needless bouncing around courtesy of Bios’ spherical shield. The potential for fun was there, but it’s just too chaotic to ever feel in control. Bosses fare better, taking the form of grand showstoppers, including a dune surfing sandworm to latch onto, and a large robotic spider trapped in a circular rink.
Star Overdrive definitely feels ambitious. Indeed, there’s something admirable about a small indie studio trying to make something comparable to the almighty Breath of the Wild. For every pleasing touch though – such as Bios jamming on the keytar while using abilities, or coming to a running stop when leaping off the hoverboard – there’s a peculiar design choice. Having to press ‘Y’ repeatedly to grab resources is a pain, while text logs and mission objectives often vanish before giving the chance to read them fully. On top of all this, lots of elements feel more finicky than fun. Bios can double jump, dash, and deploy bounce pads yet platform jumping never feels fluid. Adding additional woe, mistiming jumps can potentially result in a ‘Game Over’ or falling to the foot of large structures. The top half of the map isn’t pleasurable to explore either, almost entirely formed of walled mazes with identical corridors.
The result is a game formed of fits and starts; for every alluring landscape to speed a cross there’s a dull quarry or similar to become stuck in, like a spider trying to escape a bathtub. Some puzzles are inventive and make you think, while others are poorly implemented or illogical. And while the world may be peppered with distractions, they aren’t of the fun and rewarding kind. You may go out of your way to discover a race you’re not equipped to win, or a tower that cannot be climbed yet, or a chest swarming with enemies too troublesome to be worth the effort.
I didn’t get a sense of open world fatigue while playing Star Overdrive as it’s quite different to most open world games, successfully avoiding Ubisoft’s boilerplate approach, but at the same time I didn’t feel that there’s ‘space’ for it in within the pantheon of open-world games either – and that’s despite the developers clearly having the best of intentions. That said, even if it only partly fulfils the promise of being a Sci-Fi Zelda, it has just enough interesting features and gimmicks to make it worth a cursory glance. It’s a game hard to dislike, but equally hard to love.
Caracal’s Star Overdrive is out 18th June on PS5, Xbox Series and PC. Published by Dear Villagers. A Switch version is also available.