Phenixx Gaming

When warmer weather comes to my area, the bulk of great games and movies seem to arrive on our screens. While looking through all of the upcoming releases, there was one title that stuck out to me above the rest. That title was Star Overdrive. This game caught my attention at first solely through the box art, and I decided to go in relatively blind, which is not something that I typically do when buying a game or picking what to review. While booting up Star Overdrive for the first time, I had one question in mind: Will this game be as cool as the box art? Let’s find out.

For those of you who have never heard of Star Overdrive, it is an open-world action game where you crash land on an unfamiliar planet in search of a lost friend. While trying to locate where she is, you must also investigate the mysteries surrounding this unusual planet. What on this planet caused your ship and others to crash? What happened to the company your friend was investigating? Why did your friend disappear? How are you going to get off this planet?

While there are a lot of mysteries to solve within this story, I also ran into a mystery of another sort: How to play this game? This game is very reminiscent of the games from my childhood that had a minimal tutorial. Back in my childhood, we had a game manual to look at should things get confusing. Sadly, in the age of digital games, that is something that rarely exists. The thing that did me in was my itch to explore the world. Something about open-world games often gets me to ignore the main story in the pursuit of traveling around and finding various knick-knacks. This game doesn’t encourage that in the beginning, as there are several important upgrades that you have to get in the opening story so that you can easily navigate the obstacles you will run into. 

The good thing about this forceful sitting of the opening story is that you learn the controls quickly. However, some of the upgrades make certain tools and buttons useless. Take, for example, the basic swing of the keytar. It is very weak in the beginning, but it is your only tool against enemies. However, you quickly get the ability to lift enemies and objects in the air, which proves to be very powerful. This ability makes the swing of the keytar feel useless. There are still a few puzzles that the keytar can be used for, but other than that, there is almost no reason to use it as a weapon.

In terms of story, Star Overdrive borrows a lot of themes and inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The main character has no spoken dialogue throughout the game, and you are completely out of the loop in terms of what has happened in the world before your arrival. The only thing that seems to be missing is that there isn’t an initial big bad that looms over everything. Instead of a character like Ganondorf, the planet seems to be what is fighting against you. Star Overdrive also shares a lot of similarities with older games, such as the main character’s aversion to water. There were multiple times when I wanted to explore the world, and I was stopped by a body of water and a lack of cliffs to jump off of. Eventually, I got around to receiving the upgrade to fly across the water, but not before doing almost everything possible on the first bit of land. 

Overall, I believe that Star Overdrive is a neat indie title that is worth checking out. If you are a fan of the most recent Legend of Zelda games, I believe that this game will be right up your alley. It also made me think a lot about Immortals Fenyx Rising, given the unique art style, overall gameplay, and open world possibilities. Granted, the world of Immortals Fenyx Rising didn’t have as many guardrails as Star Overdrive does.

One thing that I would’ve liked is if the main character had more of a personality as I think that would’ve made it easier to connect with and allow for more interesting story beats. If you are looking for more games with an interesting world, consider checking out Taylor Bauer’s review of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition right here.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Star Overdrive was provided by Caracal Games for this review. 

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Star Overdrive

34.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Zelda Style Gameplay
• Unique Art Style
• Early Story Hook

Cons

• Lack of Main Character Development
• Restrictive Open World