Even back in the 1977 original film, Star Wars has always been a universe full of vehicles that move at incredible speeds. While its spaceships are famously fast — just ask anyone about the Millennium Falcon’s record-breaking Kessel Run — its land vehicles might be more impressive as they tear through forests and canyons at breakneck, often deadly pace.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer continues a video game tradition of capturing that speed by putting you behind the controls of landspeeders, speeder bikes, and podracers. I played about an hour of Galactic Racer at Summer Game Fest and came away excited for a game that expands on the Star Wars universe, and goes fast doing it.
Set after the fall of the Empire, Galactic Racer places you on the Outer Rim, where lawlessness has allowed for the rise of an unsanctioned racing circuit called the Galactic League. You play a helmeted human called Shade, who is recruited by the League’s creator, Darius Pax, to defeat the circuit’s reigning champion. Turns out, Shade also has a history with the champ, Kestar Bool, and so you jump into the circuit for a personal vendetta as much as a love of speed and a need for credits. The story portions of Galactic Racer show glimpses of the larger galaxy, beyond the usual battles between good and evil.
The SGF demo focused mostly on the campaign mode, and the portion I played centered on racing the more stable and reliable speeders, rather than the barely-held-together podracers (though podracers appear in the game too). Speeders come in three types: the car-like landspeeders, the fast and fragile speeder bikes, and the agile skim speeders. Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as its own specific abilities that can help you win races.
Landspeeders are bigger and heavier than the other options, allowing them to take more of a beating than other vehicles if you bounce them off walls or other racers. They also have the ability to drift around turns to help you keep your racing line clean.
Speeder bikes are faster than landspeeders, but much easier to wreck. They have an ability called Kinetic Burst, which gives a quick blast of speed that helps you re-orient your bike to handle tight turns.
Skim speeders are a little more like starships than speeders, and are the most graceful of the three types. They offer the most maneuverability thanks to the Knife Edge ability that lets you flip them on on their sides for tighter turns.
All your speeders also come equipped with an Afterburner you can activate with X, which can give you a quick speed boost to overtake racers or extend a lead, and a powerful booster called a Ramjet, activated by pressing and holding R3. The Ramjet can boost for a long period to greatly increase your speed, but as you use it, a heat meter slowly fills on your screen.
If it heats up too much, your speeder runs the risk of exploding, but if you release the Ramjet early, you’ll have to wait for it to charge back up completely before you can use it again. You can also unlock and equip special abilities, such as shields to protect you from impacts or weapons to use against other racers, that can be activated by hitting L1.
Events are scattered across different, famous Star Wars planets, which brings a lot of character to each race. For example, courses on Jakku take you through the graveyards of crashed Imperial ships, while Lantaana’s tracks mix dense jungles and fiery volcanoes.
In the campaign, the circuit takes on a roguelite structure — while you race across each planet in a specific order, which specific events you face on each planet is randomized. You’re presented with three different “paths” at the start of a run, which show you what kinds of events you’ll face so you’ll have some idea of what to expect.
Events include standard races, Field Tests that require you to hit a certain time with a new vehicle, Eliminators that remove the bottom competitors over the course of a race until only the top three remain, and Mystery Encounters that seem like they could be anything from a race to a story-driving conversation. Never quite knowing what you’ll face next helps Galactic Racer maintain the sense of being an up-and-coming racer who might be a little out of their depth.
You’ll have to hone your racing skills and strengthen your speeder on each run in order to stay competitive, and you can earn and buy upgrades that power up your vehicle, as well as some that persist between runs.
The races I played were satisfyingly tough — there are canyon walls and hunks of debris everywhere, and you’ll need to react quickly, as wrecks can be devastating. Crash too many times, and you’re bounced from the circuit, forced to restart your run from the beginning. If you’re skilled and devious, though, you can wreck your opponents in spectacular fashion by forcing them into walls or obstacles, giving Galactic Racer a bit of a Burnout: Takedown feel.
In addition to the campaign, Galactic Racer includes a multiplayer mode, a Scenarios mode that includes longer-term challenges focused on specific characters, and an Arcade mode for quick races. I also tried the Arcade mode, jumping into a podrace as the villainous Sebulba from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and running a treacherous track on Tatooine.
Podracers feel very speedy in Galactic Racer. The tradeoff is that they’re much more unstable than speeders, and just about any impact blows them apart. That made racing as Sebulba — whose podracer spits fire to take out other racers when you hit L1 — an exciting but tough proposition. His racer is incredibly fast and maneuverable, and great at taking down other racers, but you also need to be careful in managing your speed and making tight turns to avoid clipping the rocky canyon walls of Tatooine.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer looks to be both a deep and interesting look at a specific pocket of the Star Wars galaxy, with all the speed Star Wars fans expect. You can jump into your speeder’s cockpit yourself when Galactic Racer hits PlayStation 5 on October 6.