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Reviewed On: Nintendo Switch (Exclusive Release)
Price: Digital ~ $34.99 USD (Standard) / $39.99 USD (Deluxe) — Physical ~ $39.99USD
Developer: Caracal Games
Publishers: Dear Villagers
Release Date: April 10th, 2025
Please Note: A review code was provided for this review but does not influence the opinions stated here in any way.
Dear Villagers has been publishing a lot of titles as of late, and their latest project is Star Overdrive. This is a title developed by Caracal Games who have developed three other games in the past. Unfortunately, I was not super familiar with this studio before this game, but after checking out their other projects, I am going to be keeping my eye out for OkunoKA in the future as it seems right up my alley as a platformer fan! Star Overdrive is their biggest project yet, at least from what I could see, and this game was featured in the Switch 1 direct a little while ago which I thought was cool for the indie title. This game is clearly a mix of many other titles meshed together, but does this game just stay in the shadows of those before it, or does it do enough to hold its own? Well, that is why I am reviewing the game and exactly what I will answer in the review.
In the game, you play as Bios who gets a distress signal from someone named Nous. Nous is a person of interest that Bios liked before something happened to her. You get to the planet called Cebete where the distress signal was sent from, and you learn this is where Nous was when she was researching it. In order to find out what happened to her, you have to start using your weapon called the Keytar and also a hoverboard to travel the planet. The first objective when you arrive to the main area is to climb and activate a tower in order to get more information of the world you are in. After you activate this tower, you learn that you need more information and access by completing different areas called Mines. Once you have progressed enough with going through these and completing different tasks, you have to go to the orbital elevator on the planet. Once there, you find out that you have to get 3 components that were taken to different parts of the world and bring them back.
You need to complete different tasks in order to find the locations of the objects that you need. Once you complete the tasks, you learn that the objects are being held by creatures called Pulse Wraiths. What these are, well… play the game and you will learn more about them. After you get these components, you learn more information of what happened to Nous and what is going on with the planet in small segments and cutscenes. There wasn’t anything too unpredictable or shocking for what was explained, except for the end of the game which I didn’t see coming when [redacted to prevent spoilers]. Bios doesn’t have a character development arc which I was hoping he was going to get one as he was way more flat as a main character than I thought at first. The story was decent, but there wasn’t anything memorable and wasn’t the main reason why I stayed in the game. The reason why I really kept playing this game, and most games in general, was because of the core gameplay and boy was it an interesting experience overall.
In the game, you will be using your hoverboard and Keytar a lot, so an explanation of those are in order. The Keytar is your weapon where you have to use it to attack enemies, solve puzzles, and for traversal sections. Some enemies will go down easier with basic or charged physical attacks, while other enemies you will need to use special powers that you find throughout the adventure. You have a shield to help protect you from taking too much damage, but this shield can break if you aren’t careful enough! One of the powers you get is the power to manipulate your opponent and brainwash them to work for you to attack other enemies or to help solve puzzles. Another one is a ranged gun attack to attack objects or enemies out of reach of physical attacks. There is a total of six powers, but I don’t want to spoil everything. In order to use these powers, you will consume energy power. There isn’t enough of it to spam it endlessly, but the energy does recharge over time. You can get more throughout the game, but also if you complete tricks on your hoverboard when riding, it will recharge the energy bar you have.
Your hoverboard is the other big part of the game as it is the only way to travel the big map. There is no fast travel in the game (minus to the orbital elevator) and while I understood they were wanting you to explore the big world through the hoverboard riding, I still wished that it was an option as it gets a bit old after 10 hours or so. At first your hoverboard is SLOW, like really slow. In order to go faster, you need to find engineering benches to craft new parts for the board. Also, if you are lucky you can search crates throughout the world if you don’t want to craft. The crates I personally found didn’t have anything great in them for components. In order to craft, you need to find parts and pieces around the world including metals, alien tech, and more. Then you can craft things like an engine, wings, booster, and more to affect different things like boost, speed, control and more. If you find special items in certain areas, you can also craft special parts that will let you travel on water, metal without using energy, and more.
Once you crafted the upgrades, which you should do multiple times throughout your playthrough in the game, you should begin to ride. Riding on the hoverboard is simple and seamless, but you need to go fast as the map is big. In order to go fast, you need to pick up speed on your hoverboard by jumping off of ramps, hills, walls, and more at just the right time (green indictor on ground) and then perform tricks to get your boost meter higher. You can get the speed pretty high if you do it correctly and if you combine this speed of the hoverboard and also the abilities of the Keytar, solving the mystery on the planet isn’t that hard of a challenge. Unfortunately, when you are riding the hoverboard, the paint will start to get worn out over time so you should also re-paint the board on occasion to get it top working condition. While riding around there are many things that you have to do for the main quest, and also a lot of things that are optional in the world.
Now that I explained the hoverboard and Keytar, there is a lot to talk about with the main story and all of the things you can do in the world. The main quest is made up of 6 missions with multiple parts per mission. Most of them require you to defeat a Pulse Wraith boss, solve puzzles, complete a Mine, and more. A mine in this game is similar to a shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is an area that you can use the abilities to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. Most of the puzzles in the game are pretty easy from aligning lasers correctly, activating multiple items at the same time using an ability I didn’t mention, and more! There are a total of 31 mines in the game and while most of them are optional, there are a few that are required to complete in order to collect new abilities. In order to activate and challenge these mines, you first have to activate the tower in the area it is in. There are 15 areas, which means there is a total of 15 towers and while I activated 8/15 of them, I didn’t feel like I had to activate every single one of them as there was no big reason for me to do so.
There is a reason why you can and should do the mines as it does give you something that is helpful with fights and exploring the world. They give you a Power Node by completing each one, and these are helpful in the skill tree. The skill tree allows you to improve the damage of the normal Keytar attacks, more energy in order to use abilities, a stronger shield to protect you from attacks, and more options! There is no option to re-spec (change your skill tree set up), so you have to be careful with what you are choosing in your playthrough if you aren’t going for every last one. On top of the mines, there are so many other things that you can do that it honestly feels like there is too much to do.
There are loads of things to do besides the mines, towers, and main objectives. Some of these include races around through time sensitive rings to test speed and control, time trails for a very similar thing, hunting grounds to challenge strong creatures, and much more. On top of activities there are also loads of collectables from pictures of Bios and Nous scattered in the world, audio logs for more story and lore of Nous and the planet, paint designs for the hoverboard, special songs with lyrics that are really good, and more as well. Honestly, with how much was here, I was not expecting it nor did I want to try to find every last thing on Cebete as I felt it might have been too over saturated with padding. There is even more that I didn’t talk about here but this is a lot already. I did more than just the barebones main story, but I didn’t bother with much of it. One great thing is once you are in the world, unless you go into the mines or fast travel to the orbital elevator, there is no real loading screens. I definitely didn’t love all of the designs from the game. The lack of fast travel to unlocked towers (like with other open world games) for me was a big deterrent for trying to find lots of the side content. There were other reasons I didn’t want to play every single possible activity or find every last collectable.
The overall gameplay might be fun for the most part with lots of things to do and find in the world. The visuals of the game on the other hand are definitely a more mixed bag unfortunately. On the planet of Cebete, some areas are brightly colored and look very pretty and enjoyable to be in. The water effects are nice, bright blue, and I loved hoverboarding on and around these areas. Sometimes, there is a pretty world that you are standing around on, but when in motion, sometimes it isn’t all that terrific with loads of visual pop-in and lack of depth of field clarity. Grass for example isn’t visible with any detail unless you get close enough. When at a distance, it is just green flat land, but when you get close enough you can see some blades and more visuals effects.
Other sections are much darker and have a feeling of a bit more dullness unfortunately. For example, the mines have unique designs for the puzzles which I liked, but they all visually look too similar where by the end of the game, I didn’t want to keep seeing the same look over and over. That is why I decided to skip over them and only got about 1/3 of them done. I get this is on Switch 1 and is an indie development team with a presumably smaller budget, but I still don’t want to leave the visuals out as it does affect my overall opinion of the game of having the visuals like this in 2025. If they sectioned off the world a bit more, with a bit of a loading into each section, maybe it would have the chance for the world to look better than it does now. That would have the negative impact that takes away the ride anywhere without boarders or load screens that I think that was a great thing so its a hard balance that they probably got as good as they can for now.
In terms of the voice acting in the game, we really only have voice acting from Nous. This is through either the small cutscenes that you see after completing a boss battle against a Pulse Wraith or through one of the collectable tapes or occasional other situation you can find in the world. Her voice acting is pretty good overall without much to complain or write home about. Now, the audio and music design is a bit of a mixed bag. The boss battle music and Overdrive songs that you find in the world are terrific. They pump you up with some great vocal tracks and upbeat tempos that get you really invested in the battles and the soundtrack. The rest of the audio design in the game from the normal sounds you hear surfing in the world, attacks of the keytar, and everything else is nothing memorable. This is assuming that the audio actually works…
Unfortunately, the audio started to bug out and crackle after playing the game for about 1.5-2 hours. This happened multiple times throughout my 15 or so hour adventure. Whether this is an issue the teams know about or not, I personally do not like when I have to close the game prematurely unless I am done with what I was going to play for the time. When you break the immersion for the game, it is harder to be fully sucked into the world. Thankfully, the audio issue does get fixed immediately when you close the game and go back in, but I had to constantly do this which meant the game was played at a slower pace than I would have liked.
Unfortunately, I really like to have higher framerates and stronger visual fidelity for games now-a-days. Don’t get me wrong though, I can absolutely deal with a solid 30fps with occasional small dips here and there. When the framerate gets me killed or causes the game to a near stand still, that is when I have a problem; especially if it happens frequently. Or if the screen has issues on occasion where things just become fuzzy or just straight up turn black for a few seconds. This is exactly what happened with Star Overdrive as I did die a few times when it came to framerate lag and massive visual issues. As a Switch exclusive title, I thought the team would put work into the optimization of the console as it isn’t coming to other platforms. Maybe in later patches or a possible Switch 2 version later, it could get there; but as of right now, it is kind of in rough condition. It is not impossible to play as I beat the game, but there were moments off strong hiccups. I wish it was better as the framerate really deterred me from doing more side content and finding more stuff to do in the world.
Besides performance hiccups plaguing the title, audio issues, and visual glitches, there are also a lot of other bugs and issues that I came across in my 15 hours of game time. One of the big ones was I almost completely soft-locked myself in the game! I got onto my board, and then in the middle of water something happened where I was now drowning. No big deal, I just will respawn at the closest land area… right? Nope, every time I kept respawning I was in the middle of the water still drowning. This lasted a solid minute or so and then I tried to back out to the main menu, and THANKFULLY that fixed it and I respawned on land when I loaded back in. I was very close to the end of the game, so if I was soft-locked, I definitely wouldn’t have done a full restart.
There were other bugs including falling through the ground or objects that were supposed to be solid but weren’t. Another issue I personally had was the camera sometimes would have a complete mind of its own and not listen to what I was telling it. Other ones include random respawning of my character if I got hit. I hit a wall and was on the bottom part before, and now I am suddenly at the top of the wall after I get back up. A few times I had the control power on, and it was activating the bounce pad when it wasn’t the one that was selected on the wheel. I had a few glitches when I was just riding around on the hoverboard with BIOS and it would randomly make me take damage when I didn’t even leave the ground or was near any kind of enemy. Now, are any of these smaller bugs game breaking? Absolutely not, but when they stack up enough, it definitely takes the toll on my enjoyment of the title.
Honestly, the story was okay with me where I got the gist of what happened with Nous and Bios and how things played out. I pieced together part of the overarching story and lore with some of the tapes scattered in the world, but probably could go even deeper if there was reason for me to which there wasn’t. The gameplay was fun most of the time without the camera issues, bugs, or glitches causing problems. Doing tricks and getting your hoverboard parts and quality higher was fun to figure out the best set-up for different situations. The bosses were both fun and annoying, and the puzzles mixed in the game were nice. The audio design, music, art, visuals, and performance throughout the game were mixed bags. There were absolutely some moments of greatness but there was also a bunch of moments that were weak which I wish the team could have gotten better. Given it being an indie team, exclusively on the Switch, and with the overall open-world gameplay doing what it did I do have to give the team props. Saying that though, this title isn’t one that is fully out of the shadow of the ones that it is inspired from like The Legend of Zelda BOTW / TOTK, SSX, and others. It does some unique things, but has a lot of stuff I have seen already. It is definitely not the worst game I have played, but it isn’t the greatest either.
Review Score: 7/10
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