If you ask me, Disney has been pretty smart in recent years about its Star Wars video games. Instead of relying solely on its small group of internal development teams, as it did a long time ago in a gaming galaxy far, far away – or signing an exclusivity deal with one single publisher, as it did last decade with EA – The Mouse now hands its licenses, Star Wars included, to absolutely anyone with a great pitch. And we’ve already had one Game of the Year-caliber masterpiece come out of this strategy (2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, from the Riddick and Wolfenstein veterans at MachineGames).
And so when Lucasfilm first announced Star Wars: Galactic Racer earlier this year as a collaboration with developer Fuse Games – who counts a number of Burnout alumni in its ranks – my optimism immediately skyrocketed. A Star Wars racing game made by people who have some of the best arcade racers ever made under their belts? Yes please! And now that I’ve finally had the chance to play Galactic Racer, I don’t need to search my feelings, because I already know it to be true: this high-speed roguelite (more on that in a bit) racer is an absolute blast.
Made in the Shade
The setup is simple: you’re Shade, a semi-willing participant in the galaxy’s renegade racing circuit, out amongst the Outer Rim, where rules and laws are more like requests and polite suggestions. I say “semi-willing” because you’d rather lay low and avoid Kestar Bool, a powerful enemy who has both the means and enough pettiness in his bones to make your life difficult if you get in his way. But that eventually leads you to, in turn, want to knock Bool off of his comfy perch. And so you’ll race speeder bikes, skim speeders, landspeeders, and yes, podracers in a series of events in order to advance up the ranks and through the entire circuit to get to the top spot.
Galactic Racer builds this in a roguelite loop that, if I’m being honest, I was extremely skeptical about prior to playing it for myself. My first thought was, “Don’t we have enough roguelites out there already?” The answer is still probably yes, but to Fuse’s credit, how they’ve wrapped the roguelite template around Galactic Racer makes a ton of sense. You customize your character, make your vehicle your own through earned cosmetic unlocks, and most importantly, build your ride to your preference with the gameplay-affecting abilities you earn through winning races. But the Outer Rim is a ruthless place and this circuit isn’t one for second chances, so you can only race by earning a League Token. If you lose it in one of the Eliminator races you’ll inevitably come upon during your run – and yes, they operate exactly the same as Burnout’s Eliminator races, in which the last-place driver is disqualified from the competition at the end of each lap – you’ll have to start the run all over again. But, in classic roguelite fashion, you’ll be able to bring anything you’ve previously unlocked to the table as you have another go at it.
And the Eliminators are no joke, I should add. In my 45-minute hands-on time, I did the first race or two in my run after customizing my character and then jumping right in, but then immediately hit my first Eliminator. I got too aggressive going for a takedown in one early-race turn and ending up putting myself into the wall near the end of a lap, without enough time to get back out of last place before I got eliminated. Oh, and the takedowns, by the way, are exactly as you remember them from Burnout – right down to using a nearly identical camera angle when you see the slow-motion wreck. Anyway, I had to start the run again, from scratch. I quickly learned that the CPU-racer AI means business in Galactic Racer. I was stunned to have been bounced from the tournament so quickly, but honestly kind of impressed. It made me steel myself for the next run, where I did a heck of a lot better.
A Stroll Around the Neighborhood
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Though there’s plenty more to say about the racing portion of Galactic Racer, obviously, I want to give props to the on-foot sections you’ll experience between races. In them, you roam around each planet’s “paddock” – think of these kind of like the infield areas of a NASCAR race – and can talk to fellow racers, upgrade your ship with Hibi the monkey-like mechanic, tweak your character’s or vehicle’s appearance, or chat with the organizer of this whole thing, Darius Pax – a big-voice, big-personality creature who sounds a bit like he’s channeling Danny DeVito’s Penguin from Batman Returns.
When you’re ready to hit the track, you have a couple of interactive moments that can give you an initial gameplay advantage: the first is your ignition sequence. Regardless of what vehicle type you’re piloting, if you successfully hit the prompted button sequence in the brief window of time allotted, you’ll begin the race with a bonus, like your afterburner being primed and/or your shield being fully charged up and ready to deploy right at the starting line. I’ll note that the sequence was the same in every single one of my races, so hopefully they’re all randomized in the final October 6 release just to keep me on my toes a bit more.
And the second pre-race opportunity is to surge out of the starting gates, Mario Kart-style, by keeping your throttle in the middle of the three zones of the on-screen meter as the green flag figuratively drops. In these high-speed races that can be won or lost in a second or two, that initial moment matters more than you might guess.
Show Off Your Abilities
OK, yes, properly nailing your ignition sequence is important, but what really makes or breaks your race is how frequently and effectively you use your abilities. I only saw a couple of them during my hands-on time, but there are plenty of them to unlock, and they’ll allow you to craft a pretty bespoke build for your vehicle.
Take the aforementioned shield, for instance. If you’re bunched up tight in a cluster of fellow racers, you can be sure that at least one of them will try to shunt you into the nearest wall. Nailing the timing on your shield ability so that it’s active when that takedown attempt comes – and before running out of juice and needing to recharge via cooldown timer – can save you from a fate of having to be blotted off the track’s walls with Handi-Wipes.
The other one I used extensively during my hands-on session was Ramjet, which sadly I don’t have footage of. It’s functionally the same as an afterburner, with the key difference being that you can keep the extra push of speed going past its cooldown point – at the risk of pushing it too far and having your craft explode. I earned some modifiers for this as I played, including one that would reduce Ramjet consumption by 50% while in midair (meaning, on a jump, since of course all of these Star Wars racing vehicles are technically in midair all the time).
The tracks, meanwhile, vary from short to long and from hot to cold, depending on which planet they’re located. Jakku doesn’t have any temperature concerns, but Lantaana has patches of magma on track that will overheat your vehicle if you’re not careful, while Ando Prime is an ice world where you’ll need to zip through conveniently placed heating tunnels in order to not get fully frozen over and thus slowed down. On all of them, knowing when to drift is crucial – particularly on tracks that have shortcuts accessed by hitting those borderline-hairpin turns just right – as is making sure you are never sitting on a full reserve of afterburner. Between constantly boosting, drifting, avoiding environmental hazards, finding shortcuts, taking down rivals and avoiding them taking you down, there’s plenty in this arcade racer to keep you on your toes at all times.
Become a Pod God
The developers purposely allotted me time to experience podracing at the end of my demo in an Arcade mode outside of the regular roguelite circuit. I’m glad they let me get my sea legs under me first, because the podracers proved to be a much more difficult space horse to tame. They’re much faster than the other vehicles, while also being a heck of a lot more fragile. Not to mention that the track I podraced on was Tatooine, which included a particularly harrowing narrow canyon run where one wrong move would turn me into a stain on the canyon walls. Once I get more comfortable with podracing in the full game, I definitely want to play around with the camera angles; there’s a cockpit view that looks especially cool on the podracer, but requires your reflexes to be even quicker.
All in all, not only were my fears of the roguelite loop unfounded, but the Burnout roots baked into developer Fuse Games’s DNA was joyously evident in every moment I spent on the track with Star Wars: Galactic Racer. And the times I wasn’t going hundreds of miles per hour when I was on foot did a great job of further Star Wars-ifying my experience. I’m incredibly optimistic about what I’ve seen from this long overdue spiritual successor to Episode 1: Pod Racer, and I can’t wait to play more of it.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.