I recently had a chance to play a healthy chunk of the upcoming Star Wars: Galactic Racer, a—you guessed it—racing game where you can hop behind the seat of a handful of different vehicles: Landspeeders, a skim speeder, and speeder-bikes. There's also, naturally, podracing.
Each of these vehicles handles differently—landspeeders are the most consistent (they're basically just a car) and drift well, skim speeders are similar to land speeders, except they have a "knife's edge" mode that lets them tilt sideways to narrow their profile and dodge obstacles, and speeder-bikes are quicker with less control in the turns and, owing to being bikes, are more fragile.
I don't know the specifics of how podracers are tuned compared to landspeeders—but based on my experience, they're capable of both agile turns and breakneck speed, and you'll usually only be racing them against each other in specific arcade modes or multiplayer, though they do apparently pop up in the singleplayer campaign down the road.
I can't yet speak to the multiplayer, but I can talk about the game's singleplayer campaign, which has pleasantly surprised me in that hey, it's a roguelike, and I like those! Now, to those of you with roguelike fatigue, that might pull a groan from your weary chests—I am not one of those people. I am a wretched creature who loves meta-progression and repeat runs and incremental mastery, and I was having a ball.
The broad strokes: You play as Shade, a mysterious racer who has been called in to knock the socks off snooty nepo-baby Kestar Bool—bringing along your delightfully-accented mechanic, a four-armed lady named Hibi, and your ride. Which in true roguelike fashion starts out as a piece of junk.
To put Bool in his place, you're gonna need to complete galactic tours, and if you've played any roguelike before in your life, you know what's going on here. There are branching paths and you get a choice of three upgrades on occasion—the build variety of which is actually pretty in-depth.
Developer Fuse Games has done a bang-up job of stretching the game's core mechanics—drifting, boosting, a ramjet (a more aggro boost that can blow your speeder up if you're not careful), takedowns, and abilities like shields, flamethrowers, and so on—and finding ways to create builds around them.
For example, in one run, I focused on fleshing out my ramjet's functionality, lowering its cooldown and combining that with an upgrade that instantly recharged my normal boost whenever my ramjet came online. But I also saw potential builds based around scoring takedowns and "redlining", which means existing in the danger zone of your ramjet's overheated state.
The nodes themselves are decently varied, too. You've got little challenges peppered between the actual races, and those races themselves have some variety—for example, most races just need you to place within the upper echelons, but there are riskier elimination races where the lowest-ranking pilots are punted out of the running for crimes against speed (namely, their lack of it).
If you bungle one of these races, you lose one of your tokens—which serve as your lives for that run, and can also be collected as a reward to keep your races rolling, too. And if you do crash out, you get a bundle of credits for your trouble, which can be spent to increase your base stats—or buy cosmetics, once you've got your vehicle of choice upgraded.
It reminds me a lot of a high-budget, more arcade-racer version of RageSquid's Descenders, which is no bad thing. I've spent a couple dozen delightful hours in that game tearing up the dirt and trying to do cool flips, and I can easily imagine losing a similar amount of time to the rinse & repeat nature of Star Wars: Galactic Racer's singleplayer strategy.
Balance is, of course, an issue—SW:GR is in part an arcade racer, meaning that you're mostly going to get wrecked by other racers slamming into you or messing you up with their abilities. And even in the singleplayer version where the AI isn't mean-spirited, it's very easy to get instagibbed by some schmuck you didn't see coming.
As long as Fuse Games keeps a fine hand on the dial of difficulty, everything'll be just fine."
Which, in a lower-stakes racing mode, would be less frustrating. But I can absolutely see this becoming infuriating in a mode where your deaths might scupper an entire run—however, that's a numbers game. As long as Fuse Games keeps a fine hand on the dial of difficulty, everything'll be just fine.
It helps that the vibes are immaculate. I've always maintained that the most fun you can have in Star Wars is on some dustbowl planet, far away from the galaxy-saving Jedi and Sith, slumming it with all the little freaks. And Galactic Racer is full of little freaks almost as a point of pride, which it shows off by letting you have a walk around and natter with your rival racers in between runs.
It's an appropriately low-stakes racing story that's crammed full of charming enemy racers, both original and returning, and there are lots of neat little touches. For example, pre-race, you need to complete a quicktime event to activate all of your speeder's subsystems—made to emulate the clicky-clacky cassette futurism machine interiors from the franchise.
It's all downright clever. While racing games with solid campaigns aren't impossible, the focus of games like SW:GR is often (and should be) on the multiplayer, and this roguelike mode is a solid compromise, providing a meaty campaign that's built on top of assets and systems that can all be reused elsewhere.
But I can't talk about that, yet—you'll be hearing more about the game's multiplayer from me on this very website soon.
