"The combinations are in the trillions": Star Wars Galactic Racer’s creative director on speeder specialisation, storycrafting, and having “a bit of a smash”

"Can you win the game by just being aggressive? Absolutely you can"

“It's okay to give people a bit of a smash,” Star Wars: Galactic Racer creative director Kieran Crimmins reassured me, after I asked the ex-Criterion Games dev whether rubbin’ is as viable a way of racing as it was in Burnout, the rowdy racing series his former home’s arguably best known for. "I don't think we'd ever really want to make an arcade racer without some of that fun in it."

Galactic Racer melds that racing pedigree with a roguelike structure designed around shaping and upgrading individual rides that you trade in for something new at the end of each run. As you’ll see if you read my hands-on preview, this cycle’s a fairly fresh-feeling way to deliver the sort of adrenaline rush arcade racers have always been built around, but with extra focus on having you make weighty decisions and try tuning approaches you might not usually go for.

"When it comes to a build, is it a viable build? Can you win the game by just being aggressive? Absolutely you can," Crimmins continued. "Just to give you an idea of the combinatorics, you can make a build where every takedown you get completely fills your Ramjet [boost] and also gives you a higher top speed. So if you continuously take people down, you could have infinite Ramjet for the entire race, and that's not even that hard a build to make, to be honest."

Galactic Racer is the debut game of Fuse Games, founded in 2023 by a host of long-time EA and Criterion devs like Crimmins. Having worked on Star Wars Battlefront’s Rogue One: X-wing VR Mission amid a decade also spent hopping between the likes of Need For Speed and Battlefield, the studio are now melding their racing pedigree more deeply with the film series about people moving stuff by waving their hands about.

"When I worked on my first Star Wars game, that was terrifying, such a massive franchise," Crimmins recalled. "But [the people at Lucasfilm] are also nice and you get on with them. You get to a point of trust where that isn't really a worry anymore." When it came to the two sides putting together Galactic Racer’s story, Crimmins said they "kind of together landed on this idea of this post-war boom".

"It mirrors the real world in a way, after World War 2 there was a big push for racing and drag races and stuff like that because there were a lot of things that were geared up to make machines and they still wanted to make machines," he continued. "A lot of the love for racing from George Lucas came from that time, it's why the original podracing scenes exist, because he was super inspired by that and he wanted that in those movies.

"So if we're trying to open the door to as many vehicle fantasies as possible from a racing perspective in Star Wars, that felt like the right place to start, the initial seed of where we are and what we're about." Crimmins added that the story in the final game is "pretty much the story [Fuse] wrote" and pitched to Lucasfilm once the boom had been established as a starting point.

Setting the stage for roguelike runs through events in the Galactic League, a series dedicated to various podracer and speeder contests, Galactic Racer’s tale revolves around Shade, the mysterious customisable racer you’ll be donning the helmet of.

"He's been brought in by Darius Pax, who's an ex-pod engineer, but also an absolute purist dreamer for the racing spirit," Crimmins explained. "In that way, he's a man of the moment, I wrote him with someone in mind - myself (chuckles). He wants to make this amazing league. He's absolutely an instigator of that post-war boom, but in bringing loads of people together, he's brought in an incredibly talented racer, but also a narcissistic, power hungry racer in Kestar Bool, who is the person he’s brought you into try and defeat."

Through a run, you compete against Bool and a host of other adrenaline junkies in races which pit three vehicle types against each other. Flying cars in the form of landspeeders, speeder bikes that’d not look too out of place racing our planet’s dirt bikes, and skim speeders which handle a bit more like aircraft. Rather than size, which is often the biggest differentiator when an arcade racer puts multiple types of ride on track at once - think school buses vs hatchbacks in Wreckfest - Galactic Racer creates a distinction when the time comes to turn.

"I think that came down to prototyping, so it was more interesting to us to have the biggest differential around cornering and braking rather than having a particular route locked off," Crimmins said. "Don't get me wrong, if you're in a skim speeder they're a lot wider, they turn on a Knife Edge so have a very different turning circle to something like a speeder bike, which is very nimble, small, and brakes and boosts. So, if you want to take a really difficult shortcut, the speeder bike is going to be easier than the skim speeder, but we didn't want to make it impossible, because I feel like it feels like too much of an advantage towards one of the different [vehicles].

"Also, from our experience making other racing games, the interest usually comes in the range of different styles of cornering across the board. Your first car might be slow at cornering, slow to [accelerate], but has an interesting drift or something like that and your fast car can brake really quick and accelerate really quick, but again, it's not the same as a drift car."

In that vein, the bike’s very quick to accelerate and brake with Kinetic Bursts, the landspeeder lets you throw it around sideways like one of the late Ken Block’s tail-happy stunt machines, and the skim speeder’s a different proposition entirely. "Having the skim speeder be about Knife-Edging felt very, very much like how there's a lot of spacecraft and how they fly in Star Wars," Crimmins told me. "We wanted to get those feelings in a race vehicle, which is why that's the new vehicle that we invented for it, because you couldn't exactly have a spaceship flying against the speeder bike."

You’ll need to master all three, plus the podracers which act as an extra fast category of their own, to see all Galactic Racer has to offer. The main story campaign’s based around roguelike runs with a limited number of lives, rather than the standard car collectathon where your garage grows as you go and you can drive whatever ride in any event provided it fits the rules. Here, you get to pick one vehicle per run that you upgrade as you go, then trade in for credits to buy a fresh one whenever you start over.

"I don't want to take anything away from the collectathon car thing, we've done a bunch of that before," Crimmins responded when I asked why Fuse have gone down this roguelike route. "It's a great thing, and I really like it as a progression, but there were two things that we wanted to add to this.

"One is consequence, so every single Upgrade mattering, every single vehicle choice mattering, every single Part mattering. Then the other thing is the journey of upgrading. So, usually in a car game, you kind of go on one journey of upgrading. You'll get to the best car, you'll upgrade that best car to the top, and you'll probably do most of the endgame content in it. With the roguelike structure, you're resetting from the start again. So, every time you play through it, you're getting to experiment with a different Upgrade, so it allows you to organically see a lot more of the possibility space of the builds that’re in there.

"Then the last thing, which I think is a kind of personal goal for me in every game I've made, certainly arcade racers, is that I want to innovate. I want to give something back to the community, I want to give something back to the genre is probably a better way of putting it. So I wanted to do something that I thought was synergistic to that arcade racing experience, but hopefully it’ll be interesting as a jumping off point for other people to be like, ‘oh, that's actually interesting, that maybe opens it up a little bit’. I think the combinatorics of the builds that we have in this game is wider than I've ever seen in an arcade racer before.

"There are builds that you can build in here that are utterly insane. I think the combinations are in the trillions. There are builds in here I haven't even seen yet, but some of the ones I have seen are really, really fun. Because they synergise with the world, the racer style, the vehicle and the Abilities that you have. You can create combinations. It’s your creativity that's holding you back when you're playing this game rather than making the number go up or collecting enough things."

Fair. I personally can think of nothing more creative than filling the galaxy’s racetracks with art installations made up of taken down racers whom I’ve tastefully punted into the scenery.