Star Wars: Galactic Racer let me play podracer ping-pong, though its high-stakes roguelike gauntlet feels more tuned for pace-focused speeder freaks

Dug-le Earnhardt takes to the track

“You race like a poodoo!” podracer Ben Quadinaros, a large bit of snot whose body is 60% face, yells as we sweep through a turn side-by-side. “Right,” I think as I begin to channel my inner Dale Earnhardt, “you’re going in the wall”. The blatant side-swipe that dashes Ben and his gangly craft against the rocks of the narrow trench also wipes me out. Usually in this sort of situation I’d respawn unrepentant, but Star Wars: Galactic Racer’s geared to force you to consider any carelessness and rue any mistakes.

This is especially the case in its singleplayer campaign, which eschews the typical racing game quest to acquire every car and upgrade them to the max over the course of one playthrough. Instead it opts for a runs-based roguelike structure, which is designed around taking multiple short cracks at winning its Galactic League series. Each run begins with you being handed a single life in the form of a League Entry Token from series ringmaster Darius Pax. Once you run out of these, you’ve got to start over, with the goal in the meantime being to get as far as you can along the pathway of Galactic League events before you run out.

Galactic Racer’s campaign starts you off with the most Burnout-shaped of its vehicles, the Landspeeder. These floating cars can be flung around in fairly analogous fashion to their wheeled brethren, at least from a size and weight perspective. A step beyond that, once you’ve earned enough points to unlock it for your next run, is the speeder bike, boasting that same high-flying nimbleness that dirt bikes do in most off road racers. Then, there’s the skim speeder, the game’s closest thing to a unique curveball. Banking through turns at wide angles before pushing on down the straights, it’s the most plane-esque ride the game has to offer. While those three can all race against each other, the podracers are kept as a separate category all of their own, designed to offer an adrenaline rush that trades some of the more advanced depth offered by upgrades and environmental effects for extra speed that makes just navigating the course extra tricky.

There are standard races, eliminators with countdown timers that at times felt ruthlessly short, and test runs in experimental equipment that don’t put your token at risk in a shrewd move to avoid folks cautiously ducking the unknown. Along the way, your success is rewarded with upgrades and stat boosts that help out in the moment and play into the rewards you earn whenever you end up toast and trek back to square one. Run on run progression’s the name of the game, as in any game that’s ever looked at Rogue and thought ‘me likey’.

The result, based on my few hours or so playing a preview version, is a racer that's tough to master, where raw speed and momentum are precious commodities. If your plan is to rattle your opponents’ cages, you’d better be damn good at giving the floating bumper to everyone. That said, as you might assume from the Burnout credentials of many folks at Galactic Racer developers Fuse Games, rubbin’ is still racing in a galaxy far, far away.

It took me a bit of time to get the hang of, since Galactic Racer’s anti-gravity landspeeders, speeder bikes, skim speeders, and podracers naturally handle more floatily than the likes of a Carson Inferno Van or Hunter Cavalry. Coupled with the lack of straight or chunky panels to serve as easy bashing targets, getting a takedown in Galactic Racer – complete with classic camera shot of the vanquished’s ride crumpling into several pieces – is even more satisfying when you do manage it. Along similar lines, drifting’s a must to take corners at max speed. Galactic Racer won't let you get away with using walls as brakes.

It’s not quite the learning curve of the twin-stick drifting system in another of this year’s arcade racing releases, Screamer, but holding L1 and square at the same time (my preview hours were on a PlayStation dualsense controller) is more clunky than simply hammering L2 or dabbing square to initiate a slide in Burnout. That said, I think this is largely something that comes with the territory in anti-grav racers, with ships or speeders always being a middle ground between the instant feel of a car snappily turning and a plane gradually shifting its wings to bank in different directions.

When you’re in the flow of one of its twisty and undulating courses across a nice variety of different planetary environments, Galactic Racer offers exactly the sort of rush that gets you leaning forward in your chair. On Jakku, Star Wars’ current go-to desert planet (cue shots of Jawas on Tatooine shaking their fists), the heat makes boosting using your chargeable Ramjet more risky, with short bursts of power generating heat that’ll blow you up if you push a specific burst beyond the limit. You do still have another form of less powerful chargeable boost dubbed Afterburner, which isn’t as powerful, but also seemingly isn’t affected by environmental factors.

Over on the forest planet of Lantaana, racing across the volcanic lava flows that snake through underground tunnels will similarly put you at increased heat death risk, as well as visually setting your craft alight on occasion. On the Hoth-esque ice world Ando Prime, cold becomes the enemy, with your speeder gradually freezing up as you go and drive-through heaters key to fighting off the frost. The acid river-laden Sentinel 1 mirrors the threat of Lantaana’s lava with corrosion. As you go on, Galactic Racer weaves more of these hazards on top of each other to up the challenge.

To me, and I’m very much risking having my PC-focused credentials revoked here, it resembles how PS3 off-road racer MotorStorm: Pacific Rift handled both boosting and environmental effects playing into that. However, when I put this comparison directly to creative director Kieran Crimmins, he pinpointed Star Wars Episode I: Racer’s boost mechanics as Fuse’s main inspiration. It shows I really should finally get around to picking up the N64 classic when it’s next on sale, but also that Galactic Racer’s got plenty to it that’ll make folks migrating from all sorts of non-Star Wars racers feel at home. Sadly, I failed to convince Crimmins to add in Jawa sandcrawlers to Galactic Racer as chugging bruisers that’d mirror Pacific Rift’s big rigs and monster trucks.

Leaning into making the benefits of any one of the environmental effects pay off is naturally something Fuse have tapped into when designing the array of racer styles that form part of Galactic Racer’s build making. These are essentially trait sets you adopt that’ll nudge you towards using certain mechanics as your go-to to gain an advantage, such as relying on staying cool to allow for maximum Ramjet boosting, or even upping the benefits of scoring takedowns to make going full Dale Sr more of an easily effective strategy.

Each race you win as you progress along the branching campaign paths which lead from planet to planet unlocks a point to stick into upgrading one of the six areas in which your craft can excel. For example, upgrading your Ramjet or Afterburner is a must for boost junkies, while upgrading Cornering improves handling and upping Resilience gives you more leeway against the amount of crashes you’re allowed per race before permanently wrecking out. On top of these are Parts and Abilities, the latter being up to four specific positive traits you can bot to your ride and the latter being mechanics you active mid-race, such as a vent function that speeds up ramjet cooling.

I went for a fairly balanced setup in the longest of my runs, starting off with boost-focused upgrades and then working in some handling improvements once it became clear I was losing too much time in the bends. It’s very hard to say how much depth there’ll be to all of this build customisation once you’ve gotten through multiple lengthy runs and begun to dig decently deep into the scrap barrel, but for now I’ve no reason to believe the combinations won’t be as endless as Fuse say they are.

As for the story, for this is a Star Wars game and there are tales to be told, each new planet you visit has its own paddock you wander to get a feel for the place. You, by the way, play as mysterious masked racer Shade, whom you can shape to your liking by picking their getup, race colours, and a voice. Your job’s to help Pax avoid losing grip on the series to its current champion, Kestar Bool, your typical spoiled intergalactic rich kid whose family wields power akin to the ruthless Hutts and their ilk.

At one point in a run, I ran into a mystery event which turned out to be a narrative choice based on Bool striding up to me in the paddock and demanding I pay for damage caused to his ride. Not having the cash on hand, I opted for one of the two other responses, both of which were rather impolite ways of saying no. My craft was duly sabotaged for the next race in revenge, leading me to explode right off the starting line, losing both a crash towards my limit and oodles of time. So, Fuse certainly aren’t kidding about baking plenty of consequences into their choices.

The rest of the grid’s filled out by a Mos Eisley Cantina's-worth of different alien species, all of whom pop up on the radio during races to yell something like ‘I’m in first’ or call you a dickhead in Huttese. It might grate on other people, but my love of racers was forged in the fires of Colin McRae Dirt 2 having its extreme sports racers yap constantly when I locked wheels with them, so I found it quite charming.

All in all, I’m left feeling that Galactic Racer’s definitely scratching the right racing itches and has enough underworld Star Wars flavour that I’ll enjoy roaming its paddocks as much as I did Star Wars Outlaws’ open-world hives of scum and villainy. As to whether it’ll break through and become a true must-play, to my mind that’ll depend on how quickly folks mesh with the roguelike run story structure and how to execute the swift slides they’ll need to avoid getting left behind in the twisty sections. After all, you’ve got to keep up with Ben Quadinaros if you’re going to catapult him into the scenery.