Star Overdrive Review – Breath of the Hoverboard

Star Overdrive Review

Star Overdrive is a third-person adventure game heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. From its cell-shaded visuals to its vast open world, everything wreaks of love for Nintendo’s mega smash. The major hook that sets Star Overdrive apart from other Zelda imitators is that its traversal is done via hoverboard, making it feel like a snowboarding game. Since April 2025, Star Overdrive has been a Switch exclusive, but as of June 2025, it’s also getting released on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

The player controls Bios, a silent protagonist who receives a distress call from a woman named Nous. Something’s happened to her on an uninhabited alien planet. The game begins with Bios and his keytar crashing on the planet, and quickly finding Nous’ hoverboard. The plot is drip-fed through log tapes, which create great motivation for the player to keep exploring. There are lots of questions proposed to the player right away. What is the relationship between Bios and Nous? What was Nous doing on the alien planet? Why is Bios mute? Why does Bios have a keytar? The way the plot is presented as a mystery really pulled me in.

Simple Controls

The keytar is Bios’ melee combat weapon. The player attacks with square, jumps with X, and rolls with circle. Holding square does a strong attack. Holding X does a high, floaty hover jump. Pressing the right joystick locks onto enemies. There are little plants and minerals everywhere that can be collected with triangle. Pressing R1 jumps on the hoverboard. It speeds forward automatically, but holding down X builds up momentum for jumps. Pressing the right joystick in different directions, while jumping, performs tricks, which boost speed. The hoverboard physics feel fantastic, and gave me flashbacks to playing SSX. The controls are all very simple and straightforward.

The gameplay loop involves going to an unexplored area with towers and dungeons marked on it. The player then rides their hoverboard to a tower, which marks the area’s dungeons. Then they ride the hoverboard to a dungeon area and figure out how to open the dungeon. Finally, the player completes the dungeon, which is usually a short puzzle involving a new power. Dungeons also reward the player with spendable points for a skill tree that increases stats, and occasionally unlocks new abilities. Sometimes the dungeons are really fun races between checkpoints. I really enjoyed the combination of exploration, light RPG mechanics, and checking things off my “to-do” list.

Zelda-Like Dungeons

The dungeon-received powers are used with R2. A wheel of collected powers can be brought up with L2 to cycle between them. All the powers have different uses. The first power I got was the ability to lift large boulders with a magnetic stream (*cough Breath of the Wild). The second power I got was a projectile attack. When I got the projectile I was disappointed to learn that I couldn’t aim it. It was just an upwards lock-on shot that didn’t feel very good to use. This is a good metaphor for a lot of Star Overdrive’s issues. Most of the mechanics are way too simple.

The only mechanic that isn’t overly simple is crafting. And unfortunately, the hoverboard crafting system is overly complicated! There are paint jobs to collect that can be worn away and need to be freshened up. The board has 6 equipable slots for engines, wings, plates, boosters, bouncers, and mods. Each of these slots needs crafting materials dumped into them for percentage boosts. Those materials also need to be balanced, so don’t mix a softer material with an alien material, or the board’s speed will go down by a slight percentage. It’s a daunting system, and one I wasn’t drawn towards. It would have been much more effective if there were accessories for the board with much more obvious gameplay changes.

Death Has No Consequences

When the player dies, they don’t lose any progress. Even when fighting multiple enemies, any killed enemies will stay dead when Bios regains consciousness. Once I realized this, all combat and platforming challenge was gone. The zero loss of progression also makes up for the fact that combat isn’t very good, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by multiple enemies. The Switch version of Star Overdrive didn’t even have a lock-on mechanic, which I can’t imagine playing without. There are occasional frustrating platforming sections, but, again, because the player loses no progress, this is never an issue; however, tighter game mechanics and less forgiving difficulty would have made for a much better game.

I had a couple of issues with the gameplay that I never got over. One is that it took longer than I often thought to jump on Bios’ hoverboard. Sometimes this transition feels very fast and fluid. But about 50% of the time, I thought I hadn’t pressed R1, and pressed it again, only to undo jumping on the board, because the game took a second too long to react to my input. Another problem I had was that after hoverboarding, the game felt too slow when I got off. Exploring an area feels sluggish when not on the board, but getting on the board makes the player go too fast for combat and fine exploration. Star Overdrive needed a middle ground speed, with a faster sprint or roll in the sections where Bios needs to be on foot.

Shockingly Gorgeous

Star Overdrive is a gorgeous game. It’s even more impressive that it was made by a small indie developer. The world is vast and interesting to look at. The cell-shaded art style masks any graphical simplicity. The music transitions between airy and curious tones when exploring on foot, to full tilt rock and roll wank when riding Bios’ hoverboard. Aesthetically, Star Overdrive is a phenomenal indie achievement.

The PS5 version of Star Overdrive has a few enhancements over the Switch version. The biggest improvement is the enemy lock-on mechanic. All across the game, there have been tweaks to movement speed and camera positioning to make play feel better. There are more gameplay tutorials for added mechanics. Difficulty has been rebalanced. Facial animations have been added to cutscenes. The PS5 controller also has haptic feedback that is exclusive to the console. All of these additions to Star Overdrive are for the better, but they don’t fix the larger issues of simple combat and overly complicated crafting.

A Mixed Bag

Star Overdrive is a gorgeous and ambitious indie third-person adventure game. It has lofty dreams of being Breath of the Wild with SSX-style hoverboard traversal. The exploration and board riding feel great. I loved the gameplay loop of travelling to new areas and gaining powers from dungeons. But the combat is way too simple, and obviously masked by a way too forgiving difficulty. A lot of the RPG mechanics are light and work well, but the hoverboard crafting system is an unexpected, overly complicated mess. There are a lot of interesting ideas in Star Overdrive. Even though they’re not all well-executed, I urge anyone curious to give it a try.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher***