Star Wars: Galactic Racer Review
Rogue One more run.
It has literally been 24 years since we last had a proper Star Wars racing game. The last one was Star Wars Racer Revenge back in 2002, and unless you count the podracing levels in the LEGO games, there has been nothing since. So Star Wars: Galactic Racer caught me a bit by surprise. I remember seeing the first trailer, thinking it looked cool, and then completely losing track of it until it was suddenly time to play it.
Before we start, I have a confession to make. I have never really seen a Star Wars movie. I watched one when I was very young, I couldn't even tell you which one, and I know next to nothing about the Star Wars universe. So this review is coming from someone who just really enjoys racing games and is judging this one purely on how it plays, without any nostalgia or attachment to the world around it. If you want to know how faithful it is to the films, I'm not your guy. If you want to know whether it's a good racing game, stick around.
Straight off the bat, this is a racing game with a twist. Galactic Racer is basically a roguelike racer. I knew nothing about the game before I sat down with it, so that came as a bit of a surprise at first, but it didn't take long before I kind of fell in love with the idea. It works incredibly well.
Here is how it plays out. The campaign is split into acts, and each act is laid out as a branching path of events. You start at the beginning and pick between a few events, then move on and pick from another list, and before you know it you are carving your own route to the finale of that act. The path you take matters. Different routes give you different types of events, from straight races to eliminators and more unusual challenges, and each one pays out different upgrade materials. How well you finish decides how many credits you earn, which you then spend upgrading your vehicle as the act goes on. Do well and your build starts to snowball. Do badly and the pressure builds, because if you run out of tokens you get knocked out early and have to start a new run from the beginning of that act.
It can be a really interesting and intense system. In most racing games a bad result is a shrug and a restart. Here it has consequences, and I found myself weighing up every choice on the map. Do I take the tougher event for the better reward, or play it safe because I can't afford another poor finish? That kind of decision making is not something I'm used to in this genre, and it gives every single race some weight.
Even if you do get knocked out early, not all is for nought. Just like in most roguelikes, you always walk away with something permanent. In this case there are multiple currencies you earn that go towards permanently upgrading your vehicle and even your racer, unlocking new styles that each give you different traits and stats. The same goes for the vehicles themselves. You can pick from multiple types that all excel in different areas. Landspeeders are the heavier, more stable option that love a good drift, speeder bikes are all about straight-line speed, and skim speeders are built for throwing into hard banking turns. They feel different enough that switching between them changes how you approach a track, and which one you take into a run is one more decision that actually matters.
Mix all of that in with the roguelike structure and you get what is probably the coolest part of the whole game, the end of each season. The time comes for the final race and you get to see what everyone's build has been working towards. The better you did during the season, the further along your own build has come thanks to the rewards and upgrades you earned along the way. It turns the finale into a proper payoff, the moment where all those little decisions either come together or come back to bite you. We can't really talk about the multiplayer that much yet, but I will say this is definitely even more noticeable there, where it literally all comes down to the last race, since everything before it is basically a building phase.
None of that would matter if the racing itself wasn't up to scratch, and thankfully it is. The controls feel snappy and the vehicles respond really well, which is exactly what you need when the game is throwing this much speed at you. And it is fast. The tracks are wide with plenty of room to pick your own line, and there is a nice bit of risk and reward built into the boost. You have a standard boost that recharges on its own, and a much stronger one that is great for ramming rivals out of the way but will overheat your engine if you hold it for too long. Get greedy with it at the wrong moment and it can end your race.
Strangely enough, only a few weeks ago I was telling my brother how much I miss MotorStorm, and in a weird way this game hit that itch. A lot of what I played takes place in desert environments, and the races have that same chaotic feeling, with vehicles slamming into each other and into oblivion all around you. With that chaos comes a very satisfying Burnout-style crash cam. Smash someone into a wall and the camera cuts over to them so you can watch them crash and burn. It never got old.
That Burnout feeling is no accident either. Developer Fuse Games was founded by former Criterion developers, the studio behind Burnout and Need for Speed, and you can feel that history in every takedown. The best way I can describe Galactic Racer is a strange mash-up of F-Zero and MotorStorm with a little Burnout chaos mixed in. On paper that sounds like a mess. In practice it's just a straight-up satisfying game to play.
As for the presentation, I'm clearly the wrong person to judge how authentic it all is, but even I can tell a lot of care has gone into it. The vehicles make those unmistakable Star Wars sounds, the kind of engine whines and screams that even someone like me recognises, and the vibe in general is really well done. There is a story running through the campaign too, where you play as Shade, a masked racer with a score to settle with the league's champion. I'm sure plenty of references flew straight over my head, but I never felt lost or left out. You don't need to know your Tatooine from your Jakku to have a good time here. Between races you can even get out and walk around the paddock, chat with rival racers and pick up parts from vendors, which is a nice little breather from all the speed. And when you want a break from the campaign altogether, there is an Arcade mode for quick races and time trials, plus a Scenarios mode with its own set of challenges.
I played on the medium difficulty and was honestly surprised by how challenging it was for a racing game, and this is a genre I play a lot. The other racers don't hand you anything, and because of the roguelike structure a bad race stings more than usual. For the most part I really liked that. It makes the wins feel earned.
That does lead into the only real negatives I can think of. Every now and then a difficulty spike pops up where it feels like there is nothing you can do, no matter how cleanly you race. In reality there is, you can just turn the difficulty down, but in the moment it can be frustrating, especially when it costs you a run that was going well. The other one is repetition. The structure is a roguelike, but the tracks are not. The events and rewards get mixed up from run to run while the tracks themselves stay the same, so if you fail an act too many times, they are going to start feeling a little repetitive. The flip side is that you learn every corner and shortcut a bit better each time, and that knowledge carries into your next attempt, but it's worth knowing before you go in.
Honestly, if you're into this type of arcade racing and you like the roguelike idea, Star Wars: Galactic Racer is just a really fun time. It's fast, chaotic and far more challenging than I expected, and the run-based structure gives it a hook that most racing games simply don't have. I've only put a few hours into it so far, and I had a great time with every one of them. And if you happen to love Star Wars as well, that is going to be a HUGE bonus on top. I still couldn't tell you which Star Wars movie I watched as a kid, but I can tell you this is a great racing game.
