Star Overdrive is a beautiful ride held back by tedious systems
Star Overdrive is one of the strangest games I've played in a while—because it swings so wildly between brilliance and frustration. It's a game of extremes. At its best, it's one of the most freeing and exhilarating experiences I've had this year. At its worst, it's an exercise in tedium, grinding, and systems that feel like they're trying to trip over themselves.
But let's start with the good, because there's one thing Star Overdrive nails and that's movement. The planet itself is really cool too!
You crash land on Cebete, a jaw-droppingly beautiful alien world sprawling with valleys, vast deserts, twisted wreckage of long-dead machines, and glowing bio-organic life. The planet feels immense, and full of mysteries. And as you skate across its terrain on a hoverboard, the sense of scale and wonder is immediate.
Your mission is simple on paper, find your lost lover. She's left cassette tapes scattered around the world, revealing fragments of the story through voice recordings. While the voice acting is actually quite good, natural, warm, and human, the story itself doesn't really go anywhere groundbreaking. It's mostly just context to propel you forward and give emotional weight to the journey. And that's fine. This isn't a game about plot twists; it's a game about the feeling of the journey.
The hoverboard is the core mechanic, and it's excellent. Zipping across vast open spaces, riding up the side of dunes, leaping over canyons, doing spins and tricks mid-air, it's hard to overstate how satisfying it is. There's something deeply immersive about how Star Overdrive lets you flow with the world's design. The game shines when it puts you in an open area and says, “go”.
You can chain tricks together to gain boost, use speed to clear massive gaps, and when the environment complements the board mechanics, it's magical. You start feeling like you're part of the world, not just moving through it.
But unfortunately, everything surrounding the hoverboard—from how you upgrade it to how progression is gated—gets in the way of that fun.
Upgrading the hoverboard and your character is where the cracks start showing.
You'll collect random resources from the world—scraps of metal, crystals, soft and hard parts, alien tech parts and then use them at scattered engineering benches to craft upgrades. Sounds fine on paper, right? Here's the twist: the system is entirely random.
You dump a bunch of resources in, and the game spits out a part with different stats. You get an idea how much better the part might be, but the amount of resources you need to use is random. So you might dump all your resources and get a shitty part. Worse, the traits you need, like being able to ride on water, corroded metal, or magnetic fields, are doled out at random. And when you do get one of these traits, switching to it is annoyingly manual. You have to pause, open a parts menu, sort through your inventory, equip the correct piece, then unpause. Do this every time the terrain changes, and it starts feeling like a chore.
Some areas suggest a certain speed or boost stat, and if your hoverboard doesn't have the right stats, you'll physically struggle to traverse them. But because of how materials and currencies are tied to exploration, you can get stuck in a loop: can't get through area → need better parts → need more resources → can't get more resources without reaching other areas. It's not elegant; it's just frustrating.
This entire system could've been so much more satisfying if, instead of randomness, you were following a story trail, like your partner had left you upgraded parts along the way. It would've kept the emotional thread going while making progression feel more rewarding and less grindy.
Your character also levels up, using a currency to unlock skills from one of three different trees. Here, too, the design stumbles.
Important quality of life upgrades like running faster or fast traveling between the giant towers you've already unlocked are buried behind layers of useless fluff. And unlocking anything requires a rare resource that's hard to come by, making you think twice before spending it. This kind of gatekeeping doesn't add depth, it just slows everything down. It makes basic movement less fun until you invest hours collecting things you might not even need.
Games should respect your time, especially ones that encourage exploration. Instead, Star Overdrive gives you this amazing hoverboard and beautiful world to ride it in, but then repeatedly pulls the brakes to remind you that you haven't collected enough shards to turn on fast travel.
Combat in Star Overdrive feels like an afterthought. You've got a basic melee combo system, a couple of powers like telekinesis or projectiles, and the ability to juggle enemies. But it never feels satisfying.
Even the most basic enemies are health sponges, requiring way too many hits to go down. It drags out every encounter, making combat something to be endured rather than enjoyed. There's no satisfying rhythm to it, and enemy variety is limited, making every fight feel just a bit too long and a bit too repetitive.
The game also has dungeons—miniature puzzle-platforming sequences tucked away in the world. These start off intriguing, but quickly lose their charm. Visually, they all kind of blur together, same cavern walls, same floating platforms, and puzzle mechanics are reused often. There are six main abilities tied to traversal and puzzle solving, but none of them are all that compelling or are used in a way that feels like it's expanding your understanding of the world or your tools. Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom this is not, unfortunately.
Despite all these flaws, Star Overdrive deserves serious praise for its presentation. The art direction is stunning. Cebete feels truly alien yet inviting, layered with strange mechanical relics, weird flora, and bioluminescent fauna. The open landscapes are massive and detailed, begging to be explored.
The sound design is subtle but effective. Wind sweeping through dunes, the hum of alien tech, the soft clicks of your board touching down after a trick—it all adds to the immersion. And while the story is told sparsely, the voice acting is really well done. There's a grounded emotional tone that gives the journey a kind of melancholic vibe, even if the narrative itself doesn't go very far.
Star Overdrive is a contradiction of a game. At its core, it has something beautiful, an incredible hoverboard system, a sprawling alien world, and a dreamlike vibe that's unlike anything else I've played recently. When the game just lets you ride, it soars.
But surrounding that core are systems that feel clunky, tedious, and too random for their own good. The crafting, the skill trees, the combat, the dungeons, they all pull you away from what makes the game special.
And yet… I still kinda love it.
Because even with its flaws, that feeling of freedom, of drifting across a horizon under alien stars, is something I won't forget anytime soon. If the developers ever streamline the systems, remove the randomness, and trust the core of their design more, they could have something truly amazing on their hands.
As it stands, Star Overdrive is worth checking out for the hoverboard alone, just be prepared for some bumps along the way. Thanks for reading!
The game was reviewed on a PS5 via a promo copy provided by PR. Star Overdrive is available on Switch,PS5, Xbox Series and PC.
