If Podracing is the absolute pinnacle of motorsports in the Star Wars universe, then much of your time spent in Star Wars Galactic Racer is in the equivalent of the BTCC and touring cars. Podracing is absolutely here, and with many fan favourite characters like Sebulba returning, but not every nine-year-old human boy can’t just hop into one of these ludicrously fast and fragile vehicles, you need to build your way up racing speeders and bikes.
But that’s no bad thing at all. The modified speeders, the bikes and the newly created skimspeeders are still plenty fast, they’re still nimble, and they still smash up in fun cartwheel-y ways.
There’s a neat Forza Horizon-style montage of racing to open the game as Darius Pax, the founder of this unsanctioned racing league, narrates the different vehicles and introduces some of the new named characters, but Darius has a problem. Kestar Bool, the champion racer of this series, is a complete tool, and he’s looking to exert his family influence to take over the league and make it his own. Darius hopes that you, Shade, with your axe to grind against the Bools, will out-race and take him down.
Galactic Racer isn’t a traditional racing game in single player, neither with the collect-athon structure of a Gran Turismo, the open ended open world of a Forza Horizon or the more story-led narratives of an F1 Braking Point. This is a roguelite, a run-based game through which you will try and try again to make it through the tricksy structure of this racing league and reach the very top. It’s a wild idea that, personally, I doubt would work if it were tied to real world arcade or simulation racing, but for Star Wars? It’s a surprisingly good fit.
You’re not concerned with earning points across a season of racing, but instead pick from a handful of options and events available to you. Starting off on Jakku, you’ll take part in four events, with races, eliminations – a neat twist where the top three will race to complete one final lap to decide the winner – time trials and light narrative moments, with the path you take determining the options that await down the line.
The overarching goal is to win these events, placing in the top few positions, earning credits, new vehicle parts, abilities, and boosting the various stats to create a custom build. But there are event fail conditions as well, which will chip away a race token from your possession and force you right back to the very start if you’ve now run out. But again, that’s OK. It’s not failure, it’s growth as you can then spend the currencies you’ve earned unlock new possibilities to randomly filter through your runs.
The core racing is immediate and fun. It’s not as eye-watering as podracing, but it’s still plenty fast, and you’ve got three distinctive styles of racing that each vehicle class provides. The standard landspeeder is pretty car-like, with a drift through corners, while the speeder bike has a Kinetic Burst that feels like it’s stopping on a pinhead and then bursting away. The skimspeeder is my immediate favourite, though, a brand new creation from FUSE which can tilt onto its blade-like wings with the Knife Edge ability and very sharply turn through corners because of it.
All have access to the Ramjet, a boost that increases your speed, makes you a bit more dangerous when swiping rivals, and lasts as long as you hold it down (or you explode from overloading it), and then recharges. Let go of the Ramjet button and it switches you back into the regular drive mode, with a standard boost to dab and use as you see fit. There’s a light symbiosis between the two, so you can often go straight from Ramjet to the regular boost.
This base can be augmented in so many ways, wether looking to improve the fundamentals of your craft, or trying to bolt on counters to the various planetary status effects, like heat, cold, acid, which affect your moment to moment racing. There’s a lot to get to grips with through this, a lot of effects which are highlighted and bolded, but where it will reward different approaches, boosting the Ramjet or maybe helping build your speeder for combat.
Ramming isn’t the only offensive ability you have. You can get an ion blaster, vent your engines to damage nearby racers, and more. You need to be careful, though, because all of these need to be activated in the race start up procedure, with rapid QTEs to quickly try to tap through before the traditional countdown rev meter appears – a meter that fills and has different sweet spots for the various vehicles.
Much more immediate is playing around with the vehicle customisation. I loved this. You can buy maybe a dozen different landspeeders, and then similar for the speeder bike and skimspeeder, but instead of just applying liveries and some bespoke greeblies and grommets per model, you can kit bash anything that you’ve unlocked together. Take the body from one, the forward aerofoils, the engines, create something asymmetrical, even. Sure, the bodywork flows and more deliberately joins up when you stick with a stock vehicle, but it’s surprisingly effective to mix and match like this.
The rules are then a bit different when you hop into a full fat podracer. We sampled this in the arcade mode, dipping into various vehicles and different circuits, so Sebulba could return to the top in the iconic Tatooine track from Star Wars Episode I, before switching to Lantaana, Ando Prime and beyond. These are then more character-driven, so Sebulba has his specific boost ability instead of the Ramjet, while Ben Quadinaros and his giant face are paired with four massive engines to give top speed at the cost of manoeuvrability.
Podracing is here and it’s sure to be a big and popular part of Star Wars Galactic Racer, but this game is so much more than that, with it’s intriguing spin on the single player campaign to engender replayability and foster different racing styles. And, of course, multiplayer will be a part of this too. More on that soon…
