Star Wars: Galactic Racer review: Arcade racing at its best

Fuse Games understood the assignment with Star Wars: Galactic Racer. It’s not a sequel to LucasArts’ beloved Episode I: Racer in any official capacity, but in essence, that’s exactly what this return to space racing in a galaxy far, far away serves up.

More than 25 years later, Galactic Racer sends podracing into modern gaming at blistering speed, joined by a trio of speeders for would-be galactic grease monkeys to tweak and customize through its Galactic Tour campaign mode.

Combining roguelite elements with arcade racing could very easily have been a chalk and cheese disaster, but Galactic Racer proves it’s a winning formula, even if the marriage has some obvious issues and podracing itself feels strangely sidelined.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer screenshots

What is Star Wars: Galactic Racer About?

Galactic League founder Darius Pax is on the verge of being ousted from the business by the competition’s top dog. Kestar Bool’s prowess on the track has grown his influence, and poor Pax wants someone to knock the cocky alien off his pedestal before the top dog kicks him to the curb.

Enter Shade, a human who Pax ropes back into the world of racing with the hopes they’ll dethrone Bool. Shade holds a grudge against Bool and his family due to some interspecies feuding that’s expanded upon as the campaign progresses.

It’s a serviceable setup that obviously mirrors the squabbling between kid Anakin and Sebulba in The Phantom Menace, but nobody is looking for a grand expansion of Star Wars lore in a racing game. You’re here to compete at speeds that make you forget to blink, and Galactic Racer has plenty of that.

Pop the hood

Galactic Racer goes fast even when it’s slow. Landspeeders (basically space cars) are the vehicles you’ll have access to by default. While they may be tank-like in size, they handle like a dream. Making 90-degree turns in a narrow tunnel and punching a speed boost through its exit into open dunes elicited a chef’s kiss gesture from me mere minutes into my debut in the Galactic Tour.

Speeder Bikes and Skim Speeders have their own quirks and identities, too, making each better suited to specific tracks and terrain, although thankfully not to any decisive degree. This is an arcade racer through and through – fretting over pros and cons, stat sheets, and performance isn’t what Galactic Racer is all about.

Instead, it gives you decisions to make on the fly. On the bitterly cold Ando Prime, for example, the climate gradually seizes up your speeder and makes handling more difficult. Heat tunnels counteract the effect, but staying cold also prevents your engine from overheating as quickly.

The trade-off is that you’re more likely to careen straight into a crash barrier, but if nothing else, the added risk is at least on point for a game about racing death machines.

In fact, Fuse has done a great job all around by making every vehicle feel satisfying to pilot. A neat little quick-time event precedes each race, boosting your various abilities if input correctly, as does hitting the sweet spot in acceleration off the starting line.

Galactic Racer’s adrenaline-fueled races are great fun, and thankfully, the decision to layer a roguelite feature on top has mostly elevated the experience.

Rogue racing

Every Galactic Tour is a gauntlet of races and events that doubles as one long build-a-speeder session. Credits and stat upgrades are dished out along the way, while branching paths force you to weigh relatively safe opportunities to bolster your build against events that can send you hurtling back to the beginning.

It’s the random encounters sprinkled between them that can completely change the trajectory of a run. After losing my very first elimination race, I stumbled across a suspicious chap who offered me more credits after every race, with the catch that I’d have one fewer upgrade to choose from each time I crossed the finish line.

That extra cash allowed me to spend frivolously on engine upgrades, eventually reducing heat build-up to the point where I could boost almost permanently. I coasted through the rest of the Tour and narrowly beat a certain Star Wars icon head-to-head to graduate to the big leagues.

When it all works, Galactic Tour gives racers a compelling reason to keep starting from scratch, but the same unpredictability responsible for those highs can also produce some frustrating lows. Failure is part and parcel of any roguelite, but losing a Tour doesn’t always feel earned.

With no catch-up mechanics to speak of, you’re more or less out of luck if an unavoidable mine at the exceptionally narrow exit of a tunnel triggers the cinematic death cam of your speeder turning into scrap metal.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of opportunity outside Galactic Tour to take a timeout with Racer’s large library of bite-sized arcade events, which is also where a certain racer of the pod variety lives.

Peculiar podracing

Unlike the three primary speeders you’ll be familiarizing yourself with in Galactic Tour, Podracers can’t be customized. In fact, they can’t be used freely in the campaign at all, instead appearing only in certain events.

Here, the experience shifts to something much more akin to Episode I: Racer. You can take on races as various characters, including Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros, compete in time attacks, or head online for races with up to eight players.

They’re fantastic, and feel markedly different to the other options on offer. Taking on the iconic Tatooine course and hearing the chorus of mechanical chugs produced by each pod’s gargantuan engines is an absolute delight.

However, they feel almost sidelined in a game intended to celebrate all things Star Wars racing. Few things are more synonymous with racing in this universe than the podraces from The Phantom Menace, which makes their absence from Galactic Tour particularly strange.

Being able to cobble together an increasingly ridiculous podracer across the course of a Tour feels like such an obvious fit that its omission is odd.

Verdict

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is arcade racing at its best: fast, responsive, and difficult to put down. Fuse Games has nailed the high-octane feel of the series’ sci-fi races, while Galactic Tour’s roguelite structure gives every run the potential to produce some ridiculous builds.

That unpredictability occasionally works against it, particularly when a Tour ends through little fault of your own. Podracing being largely excluded from the game’s best mode is an even stranger omission, especially when what’s here is so much fun.

Galactic Racer takes the simple thrill of hurtling through the Star Wars universe and builds something surprisingly deep around it. There are a few bumps in the road, but they don’t stop it from being one hell of a ride.