Star Wars: Galactic Racer is, honestly, really cool…and I am terrible at it. Racing games are not within my typical wheelhouse; I’m the guy who turned on the cheats in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas so the other cars would all fly off and explode so I could slowly drive my way through the track. That said, as someone who is a casual Star Wars fan but knows a lot of huge Star Wars fans, I thought I would give Galactic Racer from Fuse Games a try.
In the game, there are four primary modes: campaign, scenarios, arcade, and multiplayer. Despite my skill deficit, I could tell right away this this was a well-designed racing game, as the controls were incredibly tight. Every action I took while racing was exactly what I intended to do, and I can be sure of this because of how often I crashed or went off the course.
I was able to play just about an hour of the game, with the first half of that time in the campaign mode and back half of that time in the arcade mode, and yes, I did get to go hands-on with the podracing. Let’s start with campaign.
Right away, you can tell that this game is very Star Wars in everything about it. The design of the characters, the look of the racing vehicles (which includes the aforementioned podracers, as well as landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders), and the overall vibe of everything as you walk around pre-race. From the prologue to however far I made it into the campaign, I was consistently impressed by how Star Wars everything felt.
The campaign is tough and unforgiving, which was surprising. I’m bad at racing games, so thankfully there are difficulty settings for the unskilled, but even still, I struggled. The plot of the game, briefly, has you enter the Galactic League as a defined character, and in order to race you need League Entry Tokens. I won’t go into detail as to how you obtain them, but suffice it to say that after being given one, if you lose a race without obtaining more, the campaign ends and you need to start over. It has a very heavy Rogue-lite nature to it, which took me by surprise.
Speaking of characters, you do get some minor customization of your character’s appearance, but there was not very many options in the demo. I will give major credit to the voice acting of all the characters I met, though, as they all sounded great. The emphasis on the story is impressive, given it looks like a simple racing game at first blush.
I mentioned Rogue-lite elements earlier, so I’m going to expound on that a bit. As you progress through the story, you unlock the ability to enhance your vehicle’s stats. Because of this, any time you fail and need to restart, you’re in a stronger place than you were previously. Given the length of time I played (and my very early failure), I was not given much of a chance to experience this, but from the menu screens, there’s a lot to unlock and enhance.
The racing, meanwhile, is very in-depth. There’s everything from the Kinetic Burst speed boost the speeder bike gets to a Burning Status Effect that causes your vehicle to overheat faster. There’s also a limited number of times that you can get “Wrecked” per race before the race is considered a loss, at which point you lose that League Entry Token. The number of times this is allowed varies depending on difficulty.
On the whole, there’s a level of customization of your vehicles that I would not have expected. The Rogue-lite elements give you an incentive to keep going even after you get eliminated, if that’s the kind of gameplay you enjoy. Using every opportunity to upgrade your vehicle, improve its stats, and further your story progress is going to make for an engaging game for racing fans.
To comment on the arcade mode and podracing. It goes without saying that podracers are extremely fast, and they’re really cool. You definitely feel the speed increase in a podracer over any of the other vehicles in the game. I’m told podracers will be a part of the campaign later on, but if the arcade mode is representative of that experience, racing fans are going to have a blast.
Arcade mode gave me the option to pick from a variety of different race types, maps, and vehicles. It’s clearly there for the player who just wants to race without the weight or constraints of the campaign. I think this is a good thing, as sometimes you just want to jump into a race with no strings or pressure and simply have fun.
And “fun” is a great word with which to end this hands-on preview. Despite being demonstrably terrible, I had fun playing this game, much more than I thought I would. I can’t say I’m sold on buying the game when it launches on a personal level, but I can say with absolute certainty that this is a game built from the ground up for both racing fans and the Star Wars faithful.
