In 1966, seven years before sitting down to write Star Wars, student George Lucas filmed a seven minute, wordless study of a Lotus 23 race car speeding alone around LA’s Willow Springs. It’s no coincidence, I think, that so much of the feel of Star Wars is its soldering sparks and scrapyards – its heroes are engineers, mechanics, tinkerers, and homebrewers. The Empire runs on stifling bureaucracy; needs endless council meetings to screw in a lightbulb. Our heroes scavenge and repurpose; get stuck into the guts of a fritzing ship without hesitation, yank wires and twist dials until something works.
At the battle of Yavin at the end of New Hope, the Tie Fighters soar and sway with an imposing, weightless grace; pristine and cold, their pilots in shining, blemishless black. The X-wings are all chipped paint, rigged innards and cockpit-view camera shakes. The Ties are factory line. They’re Empire ships. But Luke’s ship? That’s his. His battered, tattered ride.
I think of all this each time a race starts in Star Wars: Galactic Racer, and I fire up my speeder engines to the most satisfying clunk-kerchunk and watch them ignite and glow like the grill of an old gas cabinet heater. I’ll think about it again at the league’s finale race, about all the upgrades and parts I’ve rigged together over my run, the malfunctions I’ve repaired and the ones I haven’t that have just become part of how I play. I’ll think about how the speeder I’ve built, painted and customised is mine. This unbeatable, ramshackle, beautiful piece of shit.
No point burying the lede: Galactic Racer is the most fun I’ve had with a racing game in forever, and some of the most fun I’ve had with a game this year period. Races are short, but the amount of chaos, drama and spectacle packed in those few minutes is nothing short of virtuosic. Each planet you’ll race on has its own quirks and hazards, and each map feels deviously crafted to wreck your ride if you drop your attention for even a second. Barren stretches that beg for top speed, then taper into narrow deathraps. Needles to thread or else eat shit in spectacular fashion, each a terrifying obstacle and delicious opportunity to turn your rival’s beloved vehicle into a flaming heap of scattered space garbo.
If you wanted a quote, I’d call it the Goodfellas of racing games, by which I mean that the moment I knew I was fully onboard with it involved a car bomb.
Progressing through the game’s roguelike campaign means competing in leagues, each structured as series of event nodes, similar to Slay The Spire. Most contain standard races, but you’ll also find various challenge trials and high-intensity elimination events. You’re allocated a number of tokens per league, and a number of crashes per race. Get eliminated from a race, lose a token. Lose all your tokens, and restart the league, although you’ll gain some permanent upgrade points and other bonuses to carry forward on your next attempt.
This time, it was a question mark node. Something that surprised me about Galactic Racer is quite how dedicated it is to storytelling. Not so much that it ever becomes intrusive – cutscenes are short, conversations are skippable – but enough to build of sense of who your racer, Shade, is, and who they’re up against. The most prominent of these rivals is your nemesis, Kestar Bool – an enjoyably hammy failson from a comically evil dynasty of slavers, and the reigning champion of the Galactic League.
So, I pick the question mark from a choice of two events on the node map, and I’m thrown straight into a confrontation with Bool. It turns out Shade once scratched Bool’s vehicle during a race. He’s still sore about it, and demands I pay for the damages. Problem is, I’ve just finished a planet of tracks flowing with caustic swamps, and had to pay to repair a few malfunctioning upgrades, so I’m skint. Fine, I wasn’t going to pay him anyway. I tell him to ask his daddy for his allowance, he promises revenge, and I get a notification telling me he’s messed with my speeder, removing two expensive upgrades and ‘sabotaging’ my vehicle for the next race.
Pffft, I think. How bad can it be? I enter the race, and the moment I rev up my engines at the starting line, my speeder blows up on the spot. Motherfucker, I tell my cat. I cannot stop grinning.
Earlier this month, Galactic Racer’s game and design directors put out a promotional interview about, among other things, ‘game feel’. I find this stuff fascinating since, as they say, it’s elusive and hard to define – a kind of sorcery conjured from sound and sparks, from blur and shakes and haptics. I often don’t find these sorts of interviews worth reading – full of vague, sweeping promotional claims as they so often are. But, having already played a good bit of Galactic Racer beforehand, I found this one the exception. Because it touches on something you’ll notice quite early in Galactic Racer: how incredibly weighty and tangible and just plain present these speeders feel for vehicles that never actually touch the ground. “The greatest challenge overall was reconciling ground detection in vehicles that hover,” says design director Mark Bridges, “treading the line between intuitive physics that aren’t classically correct but still feel right”. Mark, you bloody nailed it.
Success here means balancing two kinds of boost: an afterburner, and your ramjet. The ramjet gradually fills as you accelerate, and it offers a huge burst of speed and mass when activated. It’s perfect for slamming directly into the back of an opponent and wrecking them – but keep it on too long you’ll redline, and eventually explode. And it feels fast. Sometimes, terrifyingly so. So fast you might first doubt how you’ll ever safely navigate these tracks while using it. But gradually, it clicks. Corners you might have botched become a breeze. You pick up a few points in drifting. You realise that yes, you can drift while ram jetting – the default controller layout is just a pain.
Put simply, it makes it fun to suck. To crash violently and repeatedly until you become intimately familiar with the quirks of your speeder. When you finally get your hands on your first podracer, it’s terrifying. There’s a reason, you realise immediately, why there’s so few racers around that can even drive these things without dying. It’s to Fuse Games endless credit that they’ve managed to marry the light, arcadey fiction of this concept to design values that hew closer to full-on simulation. But, again, they eventually click. And when they do, the rush of skill and speed is like nothing else.
The game isn’t free of frustrations. In a single day of playing, it froze and crashed to desktop around seven times, although it seems to have been patched once already since. You’ll occasionally find a bafflingly pointless upgrade – 5% less jet ram heat, say, next to one that recharges your abilities 50% faster, for the same price. A few tracks are terrible for visibility, especially those at night, and the combination of low-light, tight corners, and the cavalcade of shakes and blurs and other effects can result in some infuriating crashes. And, finally, while the soundtrack absolutely captures the high drama and stakes of these races, it could do with a few dancier tracks, just for variety’s sake – it’s all very John Williams. Is the stuff here already great? Sure. But could Mon Mothma have an existential breakdown while bopping to it? Probably not.
It’s a testament to just how much I was enjoying myself, though, that it took me those seven crashes to finally call it quits for the day. It really was tough to put Galactic Racer down. Just within the campaign – between the various unlockable favours you can call in, the ability-led racer styles, and the three customisable vehicles – there are so many ways to play and replay. Outside of it are a host of multiplayer, arcade, and challenge modes. All told, it’s an incredibly generous package. There’s a lot of game here, and you can feel the love and expertise poured into all of it. Star Wars has had so many different incarnations and interpretations it feels almost pointless to talk about authenticity in any real sense, but without a lightsaber or stormtrooper in sight, Galactic Racer gets it.
