Star Wars: Galactic Racer is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: a racing game in the Star Wars universe, and a spiritual successor to Star Wars Episode I: Racer (1999). The development pedigree is impressive, with new company Fuse Games assembling a team of top talent from other racing games, with a majority coming from the Burnout franchise.
Galactic Racer does some interesting things with its premise. The main gameplay mode is the single player campaign, which combines a narrative story with roguelite elements. The player takes part in a tournament consisting of multiple races but losing certain events means losing a token; lose all your tokens and you fail the entire season, and have to wait to start the next tournament to rejoin the fray. Early in the game you only have one token, so losing an event is an insta-fail condition. But, whilst you lose your upgrades for the season, you keep any permanent upgrades you make to your vehicle between tournaments, plus of course you as the player get better and better as you go along. You need to win three tiers of tournaments to complete the game, though once you've completed one tier, you automatically start at the next (i.e. once you've beaten the first tier, all future resets will be to the start of the second tier until you complete it, and then the third; you don't need to complete all three tiers in one go, for the sake of sanity and any furniture near you). You can also start grudges with other characters, eventually forcing them to agree to a duel. Defeating them means taking a token from them. Certain sponsors also provide you with additional tokens, so you can fail one or two token events per run and still have a shot at victory.
This structure is surprisingly compelling, and the game is successful at nailing that "fail by doing," angle. When you fail a run, you usually know exactly how and why you failed, and how to succeed next time, nailing the appeal of games like Hades and Frostpunk in a completely different genre. This also makes the single-player campaign surprisingly chunky. It took me 20 hours to finally beat it, which doesn't seem unusual. That's a decent amount of SP content compared to most racing games, where the SP material is fairly limited with the main focus on multiplayer.
You have a choice of three vehicles to race, namely a speeder, a bike or a skimmer. Certain flashback missions also give you access to a Phantom Menace-style podracer. Each vehicle can be customised, though for the most part changing models only has an aesthetic effect. You get actual new parts for your vehicles through the game from winning events, and can also buy new parts from your mechanic or new rare parts from the specialised merchant (who also repairs your vehicle). You can also tweak certain characteristics between each race, though which characteristic you want to tweak is randomised. Also, oddly, you can only buy new parts or engage in repairs between planets, or if you visit the merchant at the expense of not taking part in a race.
This does lead into Galactic Racer's arguable biggest weakness. There are a lot of elements in this title which are "gameified," that is, it does things for game balance that have no basis in actual logic. Not being able to repair damage between races is infuriating, and strictly limiting when you can buy new gear is weird. If your engineer doesn't have any good parts, you need to pay an ever-increasing amount to reset the pool, which means you frequently waste your bank balance resetting the pool only to find you can't now buy the parts for your favourite setup. What this means in practice is that you may find a favoured setup which dominates one run but on the next, the randomisation means you can never achieve that setup again, which is annoying. It does encourage you to try different tactics and approaches, which is good, but if you've hit on the perfect ramjet build, not being able to recreate it again just feels aggravating.
Fortunately, the actual racing is excellent. Handling is solid and responds well to upgrades, and knowing when to deploy your afterburner versus your ramjet becomes a key strategy. Sliding around corners and then boosting out via ramjet feels fantastic and the game gives you a tremendous sense of speed. Getting into "the zone" as you learn the tracks and know exactly where and when to boost can be very satisfying. The three vehicle types respond differently and require different lines, and the podracers you fly in the flashback missions are genuinely unhinged, incredibly powerful monsters constantly on the verge of killing you or other racers, or both. The only disappointment here is opposition AI, which is rarely threatening, with the game resorting to the groan-inducing tactic of "rubberbanding" (mysteriously teleporting opponents you've really left utterly in the dust close enough behind you to keep things interesting) to keep them in the game.
For a racing game, there's a lot of good writing and characterisation here. The eleven other racers in the league gradually become more familiar over multiple runs, with some emerging as enemies, some as allies, some as frenemies, and some as, er, Biddy Blas. Some will also be vicious competitors on the track but turn on the charm off it (between runs you can wander around the paddock and converse with other characters). Do enough runs and you will have the opportunity to defeat them all in one-on-one duels. The flashback missions, which explore the life and misadventures of a Phantom Menace side-character, are also well-characterised, adding a lot of depth to the one-note racers from that movie.
Graphically, the game is superb, the only issue being occasional readability on some of the tracks where the track limits are not clearly delineated. This is more of a problem on Jakku than the other tracks, and also an issue more with graphics options that can make the details smeary at a distance. The game also defaults to having the cinematic camera on, which is a nice idea but a damned liability mid-race and killed me more times than any competitor. Fortunately you can turn it off. Music and sound effects are also outstanding.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer (****) is a great arcade game, with a lot of customisability. The story and characters are much stronger than expected, it has an infectious sense of humour and fun, and the game has a ridiculous "one more race" feel that may cause serious sleep disruption. Some of the progression mechanics feel harsh for their own sake, and graphically some tracks have issues with not always making it clear in time where the hell the limits are. But these are mostly minor irritants. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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