Star Wars: Galactic Racer preview: Burnout and podracing are a perfect pair

Our first hour with the thrilling Galactic Racer revealed some real surprises

When I walked into my appointment to demo Star Wars: Galactic Racer, I figured there wasn’t anything that developer Fuse Games could show that would surprise me. It’s a Star Wars podracing game with a dash of Burnout DNA; how much can you really shake things up? Ten minutes into my hands-on time with its single-player campaign, I found myself staring at a mission flowchart that looked like it had been pulled out of Slay the Spire. “Am I playing… a roguelite?” I thought. Turns out, I was.

If you’re having trouble imagining how that could possibly work, know that I was in the same boat until I spent an hour with Star Wars: Galactic Racer. But now, my only surprise is that nobody beat Fuse Games to the idea first. Galactic Racer marries racing thrills and spectacular visuals to an ingenious story mode that gives it more mileage than your typical arcade racing game. If it can keep its momentum up, it may be the rocket-fueled boost the genre needs.

Galactic Racer takes the spin-off charm of 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: Racer and applies it to something more ambitious than a movie tie-in. The core racing is fast and spectacular. In the opening moments of the campaign, I raced through Galactic Racer’s equivalent of a Forza Horizon introduction. I jumped between a few races in various environments, getting a quick feel for vehicles like speeders and bikes. I could pilot those ships instantly without much training. While they are clunkers that don’t move with the precision of a sports car, I easily got the hang of drifting, boosting, and storing up my energy for a bigger Ramjet boost that briefly sends my ride into hyperdrive.

That sense of speed plays well with Galactic Racer’s knack for spectacle. Like Burnout, I can play offense by ramming into my opponents and sending their vehicles flying. If I pull off a successful takedown, time slows down so I can breathe in the mechanical carnage. It’s a great match for the idea of podracing, a cutthroat sport in the Star Wars universe where danger is encouraged. Watching it happen against the backdrop of a sun-soaked planet covered in towering scrap heaps makes those moments even more cinematic than they are in your standard highway chase.

Most vehicles have the same basic controls, though there are nuances to how they feel. A speeder can use its blunt, heavy frame to send a sleek bike crashing into a wall, while a bike can get out of a tight jam easier due to its size. A podracer, on the other hand, is an unruly monster that swerves around the track if you move the stick too much. If you like your racing games to be twitchier and more precise, it will likely be your preferred vehicle of choice.

I did start to wonder if driving might be a little shallow, leaning hard on speed and spectacle to pump up the basic boosting and drifting. But I’m hoping that the emphasis on destruction will bring some depth to navigating a course safely. It might also just be that I haven’t seen everything I can do in a race yet. I noticed that my cars had powers I could activate, like shields and even a fire attack. There seem to be four slots for those, but I only ever had one at a time. I’m assuming that there might be some kit customization that’s made available the deeper you go, giving you more tools to manage.

I saw multiple planets with their own distinct qualities adapted into tracks during my session. Most of my time was spent racing around Jakku, a scrap graveyard. My races took me through wide courses littered with the remains of ships that time had turned into makeshift racing tunnels, and rock formations that conveniently function as ramps. There are multiple pathways in some of these wider areas, though races can just as quickly funnel into tight caves that force racers to play dirty to get ahead. Other planets, like Ando Prime and Lantanna, threw me into alien jungles and lava-filled caverns that could burn out my vehicle. Galactic Racer creates memorable Star Wars moments by drawing on the series’ visual motifs to great effect.

All of those fundamentals are strong, but the most exciting part of my demo was the Campaign mode. You play as Shade, a racer in the Galactic League in the post-Empire New Republic era. The sci-fi sports organization has a star driver in Kestar Bool, and someone needs to bring him down a peg. It’s set up like a sports movie, complete with cinematics and even some quick third-person, on-foot interludes where Shade can talk to alien NPCs like Darius Pax.

Here’s the twist, though: the Campaign plays out as a roguelite. To beat Kestar, you need to win a series of races across four planets. You choose the next race via an event flowchart with branching paths. Some nodes will drop you into a basic race. Others might throw you into a reversed version of a track. At a glance, some other nodes appeared to contain challenges like time trials. (The pathways I chose on my two runs were heavy on races.) When you complete an event, you get some currency that can be spent later on vehicle upgrades. You also get a permanent skill point that can be placed into stats like resilience and boost battery. The flowchart even contains some narrative events. Sometimes you’ll take a pit stop to talk to an NPC, who will offer you a choice of perks for that run.

As strange as it sounds, the format is a great fit for a racing game. The remixed nature of a run means that you’re not stuck banging your head against one race that’s bottlenecking your skill level, or replaying the exact same four-race grand prix over and over until you take first place. In fact, losing a race is fine. The only way a run ends is if you blow up a certain number of times. Placing higher will net you more rewards, but you can go far by just staying alive and amassing stat boosts. That strong sense of progression fuels a single-player mode that feels like one I’ll want to keep playing after clearing the story.

It’s a smart solution to a problem that racing game developers have seemed eager to solve recently. How do you make compelling single-player content in a racing game? Mario Kart World tried the Forza Horizon playbook with its Free Roam mode, Screamer linked races together with anime interludes, and the upcoming Clutch is opting for cinematic missions that occasionally play like Fast and Furious sequences. Those are all strong ideas, but it feels like Galactic Racer has cracked something that will be replicated for years to come.

Even if that roguelite turns out to be less magnetic long-term than it felt in my demo, Star Wars: Galactic Racer seems like it has enough going for it otherwise. The races are exciting, the tracks are terrific, and there are plenty of Star Wars touches that fans of the series can nerd out over. It’s a strong statement from Fuse Games, a studio founded by former Criterion Games developers. If it can land both a killer Star Wars game and an influential racing game on its first lap, it could be running the road in no time.