Star Wars games have been a mixed bag, with them varying from total pants to shockingly great. After Star Wars: Zero Company was shockingly excellent, I wasn’t expecting another good Star Wars game for a while. Yet somehow, a new racing game has managed to be much better than I could have expected with Star Wars: Galactic Racer.
The game kicks off with you playing Shade. Shade delivers a package to Darius Pax, who is an alien who runs the racing competition, the Galactic Racing League. This league kicked off because podracers are expensive and hard to find, so this league uses landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders. You do the drop and discover that one of Pax’s racers, Kestar Bool, has been winning a lot and plans to take the league out from under him. Shade reluctantly accepts to do one race, but after finding out how much of a dick Kestar is, she signs up.
Here you get to jump in on the action. You make your way through qualifications, to the big leagues, to ultimately become the champ, but getting there isn’t easy. Each event has essentially a decision tree, where you choose a path to follow. Some of them will lock you in for two or three events, and so you can choose the maps or race types you like to try to complete the whole event. The kicker, when you lose a race, you have to go back to scratch, and you will get a new decision tree with different races.
This is one of the things that helps Star Wars: Galactic Racer get its hooks in you. You can travel a long way along it, then hit a race where you make enough mistakes, and you’re starting an event from scratch again. You earn credits and upgrades for each race you win along the way, so this at least means you get to do some upgrades before you try again.
The racing itself feels good. The controls play well. The only thing is, when you hit a wall hard enough you explode. This then respawns you after a few seconds, but this can be back brackingly brutal when you are in a tight race. It’s a well-designed game, and as your vehicles will be traveling fast, it can be rough when you are hoping to make a gap, and you nick a wall and explode. There are a few different race types, the bulk of which are normal races you would expect from any racing game. The toughest one here is the eliminator, where it regularly puts up a counter, and if you are in last at the time, you get knocked out of the race. It’s a fun mode, but man, it’s brutal because there were plenty of races where I may fall near the back, and pull it back over the space of a couple of laps. When that timer comes up, you don’t have the time to get back into the pack. I lost so many runs when I hit an eliminator race at the wrong time and got knocked out halfway through.
The game looks solid too. The different biomes have that post-war galactic vibe, and the racetracks feel authentic to Star Wars in a way that works. The tracks themselves, while not huge, have some sweet variety to them, but you can’t get distracted, or you will be ramming into one of the bits of broken machinery on the course.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is the racing game I didn’t know I was itching for. It feels like Star Wars, plays well, and with the rogue-like aspects to the game, it is dang addictive. It was a good year for Star Wars.
