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After about eleven hours of game time, I have beaten the final boss (and WOW, was that spectacular!) and finished the game. I must admit, after being so excited by the demo, I was disappointed that the rest of the full game just played out like that repeatedly. There are a few highlights in the full game but, for the most part, I feel like I was just repeating the same beats of the demo over and over.
Star Overdrive takes a lot of inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in that you explore a big, open world, go into shrines mining sites to get cool powers that feel a bit like the ones you get in Breath of the Wild and then solve puzzles (which I will say are very well designed and creative), the protagonist is silent, and your motivation is to rescue a girl who has your same eye and hair colour and who is your romantic interest.
Aside from that, however, the broad strokes of Star Overdrive are very different. You spend your time surfing around everywhere on a hoverboard, leaping off sand dunes and performing cool tricks to boost in order to go around the map even faster. You can also pick tracks from the game's OST as you find them as listen to them as you travel, and these songs are definitely my style. Sadly, the open world element isn't like Breath of the Wild's in one aspect and is instead like every other AAA open world game with so many map icons. Map icons by themselves aren't a problem but they lead to the problem where an open world game like Star Overdrive feels like a game where you connect the dots on the map rather than explore and keep an eye open for environmental cues to go towards.
Unfortunately, the game has a huge problem. It is an especially huge problem as it knocks against the entire rest of the game. That problem is the progression. It's about crafting, which is one of the worst video game mechanics to be made popular. You get crafting materials by pressing Y on every single rock, plant, and enemy dropping you come across. I have no idea why; no material ever comes alone. Why can't I just pick everything up by travelling over it, ideally on my hoverboard? Making me press a button implies there's a reason I ever wouldn't want to pick it up, and that's not the case when there isn't an inventory limit.
That by itself isn't a problem, though; it's just annoying. What is a huge problem, however, is what you do with them. You upgrade your hoverboard by replacing its parts. You can find new ones out in the wild but they're so rare; you might as well craft your own, and they'll usually turn out better. How? I don't know, because the crafting system isn't particularly intuitive or transparent. I tried making a hoverboard with higher Control and Gravity but I had no idea what combination of materials with what parts was supposed to achieve that. It was very frustrating and I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
There's also problems with how you actually craft. The stats of your crafted gear are determined largely by what part they are and then by what the materials are, so why does the game make you put in the materials first before you choose the part? I'm filling out this graph to get the best lines only to find out that I was making a core the whole time and I should've been dealing with the wings. Does this actually mean anything? Do the materials change effectiveness depending on what part you're making? I don't know; it's all really difficult to intuit. Then you have to add and remove the parts one by one, which is absolutely absurd. If I'm adding a hundred specific materials to something and then change my mind, I have to patiently wait until all the materials are removed. I have no idea why this system is designed this way.
If crafting wasn't enough, there's also a skill tree. You get skill points by doing the shrines mining sites and the puzzles therein. All well and dandy but the skill tree is filled with incredibly underwhelming perks. Whatever isn't a tepid stat boost is a resource drop booster, a quality of life feature that should be available from the start of the game (sprinting and fast travel), or an attack that is as awesome as it is unnecessary. I eventually stopped bothering with the mining sites because I had no will or reason to keep putting more points into buffing my shield six times before I got something I actually wanted and not needed.
You can also collect mods that give your board special passive abilities! But they also have a limited fuel supply and, when they're exhausted, you can't refill them; you can only replace them with another one you find in a chest somewhere in the world. And that's if there's another one. Why bother using any of these things at all? They're hardly that powerful and the fact that they can be depleted means that you'd want to save them for when you need them, but how do you gauge that? In fact, why do they even have fuel at all? What purpose does that serve?
Fortunately or not, I didn't have to bother with it because the game has very little teeth. You have so many tools at your disposal for combat (and the abilities are really fun to use) but I trivialised the entire game with just the Magnet power and throwing my hoverboard at foes and had no reason to use anything else. My board was always fast enough for any challenges and I never needed to do any of the overabundant time trials because I was drowning in currency I didn't know how to effectively spend. The game is, overall, too easy; it never demands more than the bare minimum from you. There is never a challenge that forced me to come back later after empowering myself, or learning how to combine my powers and attacks together to get the most damage out of them, or unlock the true potential of the board crafting system.
By the time I beat the final boss after about eleven hours, I hadn't even done half of the activities on the map. Part of it was the repetition but, mostly, it was because there were no rewards that would be fun, empowering, exciting, new, or anything else. The only collectables I endeavoured to collect were Star Overdrive tapes because those were always awesome to listen to. The game is incredibly padded but the critical path is really short. I'd say it overstays its welcome but that's only because I endeavoured to do every icon on the map before I got way too bored.
As for the story, it emotionally hinges on you being on board with BIOS wanting to rescue his long lost love. I can understand that but 1) BIOS doesn't speak and thus I have no understanding of him as a character and 2) all of NOUS' logs only ever talk about how much she loves him, misses him, and repeating the same observations we have already made about Cebete. NOUS' tapes in regards to BIOS have precisely one subject matter (loving and missing him) and precisely one tone (dramatic yearning). We never hear anything else, like perhaps past recordings of things they did together, maybe something goofy, something tense, something embarrassing, something that actually shows us what they did together as a couple. Their relationship feels more like a dramatic poem rather than a cherished lived experience.
Now, I did just go on a massive tirade but the game is entirely enjoyable when you consider just the surfing, which makes up pretty much 50% of the game. If you're looking for a good vibe that's hard to find anywhere else, Star Overdrive will give you something to do.