Thank you to Jesus Fabre Games PR and Caracal Games for the review code!

In the years since its release, I’ve become a pretty big hater of the Nintendo Switch. I’ve become frustrated with its inability to hold up graphically when compared to not only other home gaming consoles, but also other popular gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck. I’ve become annoyed with the fact that the online subscription, which is admittedly worth its low price, only includes DLC for the Nintendo games I already own, when every other gaming subscription gives me access to a library of natively run, offline games. I’ve become annoyed by the fact that they are still the only gaming platform without some kind of achievement system. And what I’ve found most irksome is the fact that Nintendo gets away with all of this and more because the company is seen as a dream factory on par with Disney, which blinds many to their incompetence or willful laziness.

Because of these, I’ve rarely picked up my Switch in the last few years. With exceptions for a few exclusives and my beloved Bayonetta series, I’ve not had any reason to pick the thing up. Any indie or third party releases will be played on something that can run it more beautifully, and any indie I want on the go can find a home on my ROG Ally X. And of the few exclusives I do play, I don’t even make it far into most of them as I know I could get similar experiences at a higher fidelity on other platforms. I’ve put more hours into Immortals Feynx Rising than Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild combined for this very reason. But we’ve come upon that once-in-a-few-months time where a game that looks really neat and up my alley is exclusive to a platform I have great disdain for.

Well, I’m happy to report that this game is good enough to melt away some of that bitterness I feel about the Switch. Still, the few ways in which it falters are often due to it being limited by its chosen hardware.

Star Overdrive is an open-world action-adventure game where you play as BIOS, a young man looking for what seems to be his lost girlfriend on a strange alien planet. In order to find the clues that lead to her, you must uncover each area of its map, collect resources from its lifeforms and flora, and do dozens of side activities, Ubisoft style. And when I say that, I mean it, as you are literally climbing towers to uncover sectors of the map. However, the game also borrows heavily from modern Zelda titles, as there are puzzle rooms separate from the open world that test your skills with specific abilities.

Let’s say this up (close enough to the) front, this game is a blast to play. To traverse these wide open spaces, you get a hoverboard with a powerful boost that’s triggered by landing tricks with it. The trick system is simple, but not mindless, and it makes gaining speed an engaging test of skill every time. You can also get extra air, and therefore extra time to nail tricks, by timing a jump at the apex of a sand dune or the edge of a cliffside. It’s the rare traversal system that rewards skill with even faster movement, and it’s engaging throughout. Then, as you collect additional abilities, once again, similar to Zelda, you can use them while on your board to do everything from pausing time to maneuver corners more easily to spawning a jump pad in front of you to do additional tricks off of. The whole movement arsenal is by far my favorite part of the game. I love going fast, but whenever I’m given something to ramp that speed up even higher while moving, I can’t help but fall in love with it.

But you don’t step on the gas the entire time, as puzzles will also take a substantial amount of your time. I didn’t mention Tears of the Kingdom and Immortals: Feynx Rising by accident earlier, as this game is strikingly similar to both games, with puzzles being the most obvious point of inspiration. There are loads of similar mechanisms here, such as reliance on switches and cranks to move platforms, and reliance on multiple abilities to move around items and manipulate the world around you. But the most common trait between this game and its inspirations is how nakedly its puzzles are presented as puzzles. In some games, the goal of an area will be to figure out just how to get somewhere, and once that goal is identified, only then are aspects of the environment transformed through that new context into pieces of the newly perceived puzzle. Here, within the several underground mines that are this game’s equivalent of shrines or vaults, you immediately see these cognitive challenges for what they are, and often immediately know how to solve them. That lack of “ah-ha” moment in these sequences makes for puzzles that are not really bad, but are just not all that exciting. It leads to you just going through the motions rather than discovering new ways to use your toolset. However, for as relatively disappointing as these puzzles can often be, the vast majority of them are optional, which means you only have to engage with them so often, despite the fact that they are the only methods of acquiring skill points for character upgrades.

Traversal and puzzles are only two-thirds of the formula, with the last being combat. You fight a lot of aliens in this game, and each time you trigger one of these combat encounters, a rockin’ soundtrack starts up to psyche you up for the bloodshed. But despite you swinging your teched-out keytar (yes, a keytar is your primary melee weapon), through alien hordes, none of them get cut up at all. Once their health bar is fully depleted, they simply either burrow underground or dissolve away. It gives a toothlessness to the combat that I actually find refreshing, as it gels with the tone and makes the game feel lighter and more fun. Adding to that fun is that roster of collectible abilities as well, which you can now use to glaze enemies in a bouncy barrier to disorient them or grab enemies to throw them back at their allies, Gravity Gun style.

Picking up the pieces after combat reveals one of the few problems I do have with the game, and that’s is overabundance of things to collect. Similar to Horizon, you can pick up a bunch of different resources that are used for crafting, but unlike that game, every enemy you defeat leaves behind a pile of individual physics objects that you have to walk to and collect, one by one. Even when not in combat, you collect resources individually, with seemingly no way to collect these items in bundles or passively without hitting a button each time. It’s a minor flaw, but it’s the biggest symptom of something this game suffers from overall: a lack of polish. When walking around on foot, the camera perspective is locked behind your back in a way reminiscent of Gears of War or God of War (2018). However, with a wider world to explore and a wider camera perspective to match it, it makes foot traversal, and especially platforming, awkward. The aforementioned crafting system is a bit tedious due to the UI of the crafting menu not intuitively showing how different components affect your hoverboard (all crafting relates to hoverboard upgrades). And as you explore and uncover more of the map, the deluge of icons for the deluge of activities quickly overwhelms the calm sparseness you initially feel when first introduced to the world map.

All of these little quirks and issues led to me putting the game down for an extended period of time, despite looking forward to the game for some time and even planning to do a review for it. I tried coming back weeks later, but my enjoyment of the game had faded enough for only its flaws to stick with me. But these were not flaws of the game alone, but flaws of the system I played it on. It wasn’t until then that the low resolution of the world bothered me. It wasn’t until then that the low frame rate at which you surfed across the land began to frustrate me. It wasn’t until then that the long load times began to seem particularly egregious. Thankfully, a few days after this, Star Overdrive was announced to be coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox, so I requested a review code and waited to play it on hardware that didn’t annoy me.

Star Overdrive on PC, on the ROG Ally X specifically, is a noticeably superior experience. Yes, it’s sharp as hell, it runs at high framerates (even higher when using FSR 3) and has faster load times. But in addition to all of that, the game has some changes to many of the critiques I made earlier. The crafting menu is a bit clearer about which components have what effect on your hoverboard, and the camera is no longer locked to the back of your character, so platforming and movement are much smoother. But, and I know this sounds crazy, I nearly hit the same hangup with the game. Again, my engagement, my love of the game, began to fade as I played. Even if the game was running as beautifully as it always deserved to, I still found myself getting overwhelmed by the excess of open-world activities and the implied need to grind for upgrade materials to upgrade my hoverboard even further. But this is when I realized something.

I’ve often told this story online, but I do not love the God of War reboot as much as everyone else. As a massive fan of the series, I highly anticipated the release. But after gorging myself on the game in the first week or so, I was overstuffed. I collected every item, killed every boss, and explored every area necessary to get the platinum, but by the time I earned it, I was sick of the game. I didn’t want to parry another attack, throw my axe at another ethereal bird, or slowly climb down another cliff face. I realized then that just because I know I’ll love a game doesn’t mean I’ll love it to such an extreme degree. Like that one kid forced to eat chocolate cake in Matilda, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. So, when playing God of War Ragnarok years later, I only beat the game, leaving the rest for a future me who might be craving its world again.

My time with Star Overdrive made me realize that my tolerance for “too much” is not universal, but specific to each game. Star Overdrive is a very fun video game, but notice how I haven’t mentioned its story much until now? Well, there is actually a story, one told exclusively through collectible photographs, audio logs, some typed notes, and a handful of actual cutscenes saved for the most impactful story beats. The story just didn’t stick to the ribs much, aside from a Bionic Commando (2009) level twist near the end, so the thing that kept me hooked most was the fun of traversal and the satisfaction of combat. Sure, the puzzles didn’t grab me either, but I began to hone in on the real reason I fell off the game. It had nothing to do with how it ran, since I was playing it on PC now, and it had nothing to do with its more nitpicky design flaws, as most of those were fixed and changed in the latest port. I realized that I just did not want such a heaping portion of this kind of gameplay, at least not all at once. So, if I didn’t want a massive open world full of things to do, I decided to skip the bulk of those things to do in favor of mainlining toward the ending of the game.

Thanks to the structure of the game being so similar to TotK and I:FR, it was easy to book it straight to the main objectives and see the ending. While doing so, I discovered so much more to love about the game. The sci-fi architecture on display is fascinating to see interlock in various ways. The main boss fights are the most exciting parts of the game, and each challenges your ability to surf the turf in new and original ways. The final boss especially blew me away with its spectacle and the specific way in which it was demanding of me. Once I hit credits, I felt way more positive about the game than I did on Switch. But this got me thinking, if I played so much of the game originally that I got sick of it, how much of it did I actually play?

To my surprise, I played nearly the same amount of the game on both platforms, but managed to beat the game in that time on Steam. Now I question if I overloaded on the game itself, but rather the kind of content within it. My enjoyment of the core gameplay loop was just not strong enough for me to engage with it with no end in sight. Of course, that gameplay went down so much smoother at a higher resolution and framerate, and as I stated, that story didn’t provide much motivation for me. But I think reframing my playthrough with a definite and impending end made me more excited to see what the game had to offer. I had a lot of room to further upgrade my hoverboard, and I had so many mines, races, and towers unvisited when I hit credits. But I still came away from the experience satisfied because I sought out a nice bow to put on my time with it in the form of rolling credits. I guess the farther away that bow seems, the less I enjoy the act of reaching it. Maybe that’s why I never played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey despite adoring AC Origins. Maybe that’s why I only returned to God of War Ragnarok to play its rogue-like Valhalla mode rather than explore its massive world once again. And maybe that’s why my time focusing on side content in Star Overdrive didn’t make me fall deeper in love with the game.

So, what does all of this mean for the quality of the game? Well, it’s certainly fun to play, and if the fantasy of hovering across a massive landscape, playfully dispatching aliens, and exploring a strange new world to some original hard rock sounds fun to you, then this will definitely be fun. Plus, if you opt for the modern port, the game will be even smoother to play. But when you do, take advantage of that open structure to control how long the ride is, and let it end on a high note. I wouldn’t say this game is endemic of the ballooning size of modern games, but I still had difficulty finding personal value in those less substantial parts of the experience. It makes me question if all of those extra activities are even necessary at all, but judging from the sales and acclaim that bigger games like these regularly get, I suppose I’m in the minority. In the case of Star Overdrive, however, its bloated size doesn’t diminish my love for it much at all because, ultimately, you are not forced to do too much of it to beat the game, and for that I am grateful.

Oh yeah, here’s that bow you were looking for:

Final Score: