Star Wars: Galactic Racer review

The Star Wars movies have always had a mashup quality. You take some dogfighting from The Dam Busters, some swordfighting from old samurai movies, the saloon scene from a western, and you mix 'em up real good. That's how you make one (1) Star War. There's nothing wrong with that—when The Phantom Menace threw the chariot-racing from Ben Hur into the mix, it ended up being easily one of the best parts of the movie.

While Episode 1 Racer managed to recreate that specific scene just fine, as soon as you left Tatooine the quality dropped. Star Wars: Galactic Racer sets its aim higher than recreating just one scene, and instead imagines an entire racing culture flourishing in the peacetime gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, where crime syndicates back planet-hopping hotshots who race landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders across planets that conveniently have one biome each.

That worldbuilding helps populate a cast of rivals—the villainous Kestar Bool is immediately hateable, so well done there—including an ex-TIE Fighter pilot and a bunch of rich kids who could be real-life Formula One drivers if they weren't blue or speaking Huttese.

These characters populate the paddock you walk across every few races on your way to the upgrade monkey and they insult you during the races, though since half of those insults are in subtitled alien language I didn't pay much attention to them. If you've got time to read subtitles when you're hurling through a cavern at 450 km/h, good for you.

It's arcade racing, of course. A bit like Wipeout only instead of losing all your speed the second you touch the sides you either scrape along for a bit or bounce off or explode in a way that'll be familiar from the Burnout games. Galactic Racer studio Fuse Games was founded by a bunch of ex-Criterion developers who worked on the Burnout series as well as helping DICE with the modern Star Wars Battlefront games, so that explains that.

When you slam another racer into a wall the takedown camera pans over to give you a proper slow-motion look at their greebly Star Wars vehicle being reduced to the kind of scrap Jawas would turn their nose up at, though unlike Burnout 3 the computer isn't great at steering for you while that happens. More than once I came out of a takedown to discover the CPU was aiming me directly at a wall at high speed.

Roger Ramjet

Takedowns are a much less significant part of Galactic Racer than I expected. I thought this would, like Burnout 3, be a string of high-speed crashes with some brief bits of racing in between. Instead, it's an actual racing game—albeit one where a crocodile-faced alien will occasionally rocket into a wall and be engulfed in flame.

You've got an afterburner that gives a modest speed boost on a cooldown and a faster "ramjet" boost that can dangerously overheat if pushed to the limit, and balancing these two varieties of turbo are important. You have to pay attention to status effects like Cooled, which triggers at high speed or when cruising over water and lowers your heat, and Burning, delivered by the flame jets one opponent loves to deploy or by racing over lava, which of course raises your heat. Other status effects like Overcharged and Corroded and Shielded might factor into your build as well.

Those builds are developed over the course of a tour linking races together. Five of them in a multiplayer tour or the scenario mode where you get to play as one of the cast of rivals, or three acts worth of them in the campaign mode that borrows elements of its structure from roguelite games. This mode is run-based, so you pick your next event from a map of nodes right out of FTL or Slay the Spire, earning upgrades as you go, but if you wipe out it's back to the start of the act—with some unlocks that should make your next attempt easier.

It's not that far off the kind of knockout grand prix mode you get in other racing games, but like that crack it really is more-ish. One path might favor more traditional races, while another is high on eliminators, where you lose a league token (a life, basically) if you don't finish in the top three. But eliminators have better rewards, so I always choose them. Maybe another path has a random event or a visit to the scrap shop, which could result in some gear that radically changes my build and my odds of winning the championship. There's plenty to consider.

Death Rally

A big part of most builds are abilities. Ion bolt temporarily scrambles steering for a targeted pilot ahead of you, while the vent ability drops your heat to nothing. Concussion mine? Does exactly what it sounds like. Abilities are on cooldowns but also cost energy to use, and you've got a limited amount of that based on your battery, which is another thing that can be upgraded.

After events you get to spend whatever credits you've earned on a random selection of improvements to your racer and its abilities, as well as bolting on parts that might influence the direction your build takes—a part that refills my afterburner on collision encourages me to build for tankiness, while one that wipes all heat on a perfect landing after a jump means I can go all-in on the ramjet.

The other thing splitting up events is the paddock, a hangout for racers with a bar and garage that you walk through in third-person at the start of each planet in a tour. One of your rivals might confront you, a couple of racers may be arguing over drinks, or the league organizer might have something to say about how you're doing.

It's nothing as involved as the Underworld hub from Hades, but it does add a narrative layer and set dressing that feels properly Star Wars. The racer who dresses like an X-Wing pilot has a real 1970s mustache like Biggs (I think humans in Star Wars should always look like they're from the '70s and '80s, bring on the feathered hair and sideburns), and each planet has some native critters hanging out so they can scurry away as you approach.

Another pleasantly Star Wars touch is the pre-race check where you flip a bunch of toggles just like Han Solo sitting in the Millennium Falcon, a string of quick-time events that can give you instant access to your afterburner or power up the first activation of your abilities. Nailing a string of them feels great, though the ones that use the D-pad have reminded me why I hate the 360 controller's D-pad.

Get in the podracer, Shade

The story casts you as a human, customizable though always a helmet-wearing courier named Shade. (An anagram for Hades, now I think of it. Coincidence? Well, probably, yeah.) You get to choose from a handful of outfits and voices, then change the color swatch of those outfits and put different levels of mechanical echo on the voices.

Most humans don't have the fast reaction times needed to fly a podracer, but Galactic Racer finds ways to work them in regardless—including a series of flashback races where you play as Sebulba, Anakin's main opponent from The Phantom Menace. Cantankerous and bearded, he hangs around the paddock in later acts being the legend from the old days everyone's afraid of, giving out "advice" that's actually self-aggrandizement. He rules, and ends up stealing the show from the new characters Galactic Racer introduces.

The speed of podracers is almost too much for the tracks, and I got intimately familiar with the walls of the crystal caverns on Crait (the salt-covered planet from The Last Jedi) after colliding with them a bunch of times. Something Galactic Racer definitely nails is the sense of speed. When you're whipping through tunnels making turns that seem impossible then zip out into the open, redlining the ramjet as you fly down the straight, it really does capture the feeling of riding a shopping cart down a hill after a few beers—which is the closest I've ever come to racecar driving in real life.

Wacky Races

It's frustrating then how often that feeling is interrupted by crashes caused by the tracks being hard to read. If a rival like Biddy Blas takes me out with a well-timed slam that's par for the course, but a lot of my crashes came from struggling to distinguish between an outcrop of white ice and the white snow of the racetrack, or a brown boulder and the brown sand beneath it. Some corners have rows of lights strung up to highlight them, and I wish there was an option to add more of them to certain tracks.

The other thing that caused more crashes than I would have liked was the autopilot ability. Activate it and you get several seconds of near-perfect piloting, with upgrades that can boost your speed and extend your ramjets while on autopilot. More than once though, I hit the autopilot and then watched in horror as it went out of its way to steer directly into the side of heating tunnels on the snow planet, or clipped the top of a tunnel after taking a jump, or drove straight over a concussion mine in the middle of the track. Even when it didn't, sometimes I'd come out of autopilot racing toward a corner at top speed, unable to slow enough to take it safely.

I kept choosing autopilot when I had the option though, because when it works it's one of the most powerful abilities in Galactic Racer. If you're struggling on the final race of act three, fully upgraded autopilot and ramjet can carry you through. It's an odd combination of overpowered and flawed, and feels like it'll probably be patched post-haste.

Revenge of the plot

The amount of story in the gutters around the races might seem odd given how badly that stuff often lands in regular racing games, but being a Star Wars game helps Galactic Racer immensely. Every generic street-racing game thinks players will care about its cast of backwards-hat douchebags and rejects from The Fast & The Furious, and we never do. Yet I enjoyed hating the hateable racers here (honestly, fuck Kestar Bool), and enjoyed slowly earning the respect of a blue lady who dresses like Amelia Earhart. The four-armed monkey mechanic who sounds like she's from Liverpool is an entertaining sidekick, and if you're the kind of fan who will recognize a character from Star Wars Resistance you'll get to point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio.

Which is why it's a shame the story doesn't amount to much in the end. When I made it to the end of act three and finally triumphed, it felt flat. There's not much payoff compared to all the setup and I feel like a rube for getting invested in the trimmings instead of the meat. Even before the finale, characters started repeating dialogue I'd already heard.

I felt kind of the same about Zero Company when I finished that. The benefit of making a Star Wars game is if you get stuff like the sound effects and the music right—Galactic Racer nails both the gnarly stutter of the engines and the soundtrack only kicking in on the final lap just like in The Phantom Menace—then you get to piggyback on the warm fuzzy feelings the movies installed in me when I was young. Even the movies struggled to pay off on the expectations that set up.

But while I didn't roll credits thinking I'd just played a masterpiece, and the signposting on some tracks wasn't great, I did enjoy zooming past Biddy Blas while he screamed "nobata nobata!" at me. Huh, maybe I did learn some Huttese after all.