Star Overdrive

• Genre: Action Adventure/Racing
• Spoiler Free Review: Yeah - except gameplay unlocks/mechanics
• Time Played: 30 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's decent, but a lot of the game is contained in optional activities. There is a main quest, and it can be pretty difficult(impossible?) to complete the main challenges without upgrading your board a good bit, but arguably the bulk of the game is optional. It may definitely too feel long doing everything, but too short without enjoying what it has to offer. Or you could just go straight for wrapping up main quest just as you start to feel that fatigue and it it'll be over before you know it. So maybe the mainline stuff is "too short"
• Soundtrack: Absolutely awesome soundtrack. There is a fictional in-game band, Star Overdrive, which sounds like 80's hairband music. There are some other really good tracks for when the action is happening. My one complaint is there is too much "down time", where there is either no music or just ambiance. They should have leaned into it even harder and just had the music go hard at all times.
• Why I played: Star Overdrive is what I call a "Hell Yeah" game. You fly around doing tricks on a hoverboard, fight with a keytar, listening to imitation 80's hair metal, sandskii tethered to a sandworm as you hunt it. 
• Did I cry: I don't think so? It was trying to be a little bit of an emotional story, but the presentation was one of the weaker aspects.
• Jank: Star Overdrive is pretty janky. It's janky in a way a lot of much older games are. It's somewhere between if you gave an early 2000's developer access to modern tools, or simply made a game fully inside one of those online games that has it's entire own programing system to make games within it. Some aspects of the game's physics are cool, but some are just kind of janky. For a "go everywhere" type game, you end up doing that thing where you are like "slide hovering" until you land on a flat service, a lot.
• Difficulty: I think it's mostly the right amount of difficult. It's challenging without being too frustrating beyond the jank - as long as you take some time to upgrade your hoverboard.
• Recommend to others: I'm not sure. I want to recommend it, but I don't know who I would recommend it to, or what I would consider this needing to be prioritized over. It's a good game, but it also isn't a wholly polished game. I'd recommend it to people who are okay with the jank and find appeal in the positive aspects.
  

Star Overdrive overall is a pretty cool game. It doesn't really feel like a Zelda game as it focuses so much on the hoverboarding and platforming, but for easy reference and comparison, I'd liken it a good bit to Breath of the Wild. The structure of the game and the way it handles exploration and puzzles. You have a wheel of "magic/telekinetic powers". Some which are very similar. You get a little ranged shot, you get a telekinesis lasso to move/throw objects and enemies, you get a little bouncy bubble for some pretty extreme platform(imagine free falling skyscraper heights and bouncing back up just as high is actually part of a platforming challenge to get a collectible... often), you can charm/mind control enemies, link objects together, or even just to the ground/wall, and stop time in a bubble for everything but yourself. Some of these even have modified versions for the hoverboard, like a time stop bubble a mile behind you is pretty useless, so the time stop actually works for you on the hoverboard by slowing things down like 80% so you can make tight/sharp maneuvers accurately. Similarly, linking just "links" you to the ground briefly, to pull you forward to act as a boost.

So it has some pretty fun mechanics to play with and you're given plenty of uses for them, both in the overworld and the "dungeons" or.. "shrines", what this game calls "mines". But before you can go to a mine, you have to climb a tower which unveils a portion of the map. This all sounds very familiar I'm sure. The mines are usually just puzzles or platforming challenges to apply your skills/abilities in different ways. There is pretty good variety in these mechanically speaking, it just falls into that familiar problem of they all look the same, visually. Which is also maybe my second biggest criticism of the game. While there is some effort to make things visually diverse, it's just not enough. There is just so much brown/red. You get a sprinkle of green, a sprinkle of cool black with purple glow effects, but it's just not enough. A little more visual diversity could have gone a long way I feel like. Some of these mines could have been more like labs. Or they could have been rounder? They all had very building-block like square cut-outs to them. Which I guess was to make them feel very different from the overworld terrain which is mostly rolling hills and round areas... except a quarter of it actually is a very blocky high walled area. I know why it exists, it exists for a few very specific challenges to offer that diversity in game play, which is a good thing, but it's also kind of an annoying area, one mistake and you'll be doing a bit of backtracking - sometimes repeatedly, because you're stuck in a pit essentially with only one exit and that exit is several miles away. That said, if those blocky mine areas were just visually a bit different and not also pretty much just brown/red, I think it could have helped. It's not entirely a bad game to look at, it just starts to feel a little bland after awhile and would have been nice to have a bit more visually diversity.

For it's jank and other shortcomings though, it's a pretty fun game. I first played the demo and while I used to play tons of a demos, I often skip them these days, and even when I play them I might just play a few minutes just to feel the game, even if they're longer. I played pretty much all the demo would allow me to play before buying this one, and it feels pretty generous, but if you played the demo you've played the whole game so to speak. Sure you get new powers you may not have expected, and a ton more content, but it's nothing surprising, just more. That said, that's how I felt after some time with the game. Every time I got something I was like "oooh, I can do this!", so it was exciting in the moment.

I think that's a good line to explain the game in it's entirety. "It's exciting in the moment". It's exciting when I get a new song and I listen to that. It's exciting when I'm doing a race. It's exciting when I'm fighting/racing this boss. It's exciting the plummet a thousand of feet to the ground and bounce up just as high but I'm not sure of the lasting impression it'll have. Ultimately I feel like this is one of those games where the second could be a masterpiece. Like they'd take everything the learned from making the first, what worked, what didn't. Refine it. Polish the rough edges. Add new features or gimmicks, etc. That said, while I feel like there is a lot of room for improvement, a somehow big letdown of gaming history is most "hoverboard" based games have kinda sucked. Star Overdrive does not suck. I just can see so much more potential. Like it could potentially be one of those games everyone knows instead of a slipping through the cracks.

Also, screenshots don't do this one justice so some videos of an early checkpoint race.