Released in 1999, Star Wars Episode 1: Racer capitalised on the popularity of podracing, the standout scene everyone remembers in The Phantom Menace, along with the balletic lightsaber duel with Darth Maul.
It was revered enough to spawn a largely forgotten 2002 sequel, Racer Revenge. And yet Star Wars racing games have disappeared since then – until now.
Enter Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the debut title by Fuse Games. Based in Guildford, the independent studio is made up of former Criterion Games staff who worked on Burnout and Need for Speed.
Normally, being handed an IP as seismic as Star Wars as a first project would be surreal. However, the team is no stranger to the franchise, having developed the vehicle sections for EA’s Battlefront series at Criterion.
With nearly 25 years passing since the last Star Wars racing game, there was an obvious gap in the market to fill.
“We thought, we share a love of racing and Star Wars – why has there not been a Star Wars racing game in so long?” CEO Matt Webster explained to Traxion.
“Fortunately, we spent some time working on Star Wars games in the past, so we have relationships there, and we can ask those sorts of questions. Which leads us to where we are now.”
“It’s quite a privilege being able to ring up Lucasfilm and be like, hey, we think this is a cool thing,” Creative Director Kieran Crimmins added. “One, they’ll pick up the call, and they’ll take us seriously because of the pedigree.”
“From their point of view, you’re looking to partner up with people who know what they’re doing in a particular genre. So, folks who know what they’re doing inside racing taking on a Star Wars racing game is very attractive,” said Webster.
The team’s affection for Star Wars is proudly on display. Everywhere you look, the studio is adorned with memorabilia, from a Darth Vader helmet (based on the melted version in The Force Awakens) to a life-size 3D printed Pit Droid greeting you as you walk in.
Also on display are replicas of the game’s ships designed by Alex Hutchings, who modelled ships for The Force Awakens, Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
During our hands-on preview, we played the campaign’s opening act, where you qualify for an unsanctioned racing series known as the Galactic League. Set after Return of the Jedi during the New Republic era, the story sees you play as Shade, a rookie recruited by mechanic Darius Pax to defeat reigning champion, Kester Bool. You can customise your chatacter, too, from changing your helmet to selecting a voice.
“We went back and forth on where we wanted to set it for a long time,” said Crimmins, discussing the game’s time period. “We were really inspired by the post-war boom. It’s also where George Lucas got a lot of his love of racing from. It felt like the perfect place to set this game and expand the vehicle fantasies.”
This inspiration can be seen in the variety of vehicles and competitors, which include the likes of ex-Tie Fighter pilots. As the Galactic League is introduced, the opening prologue switches between vehicles and locations, introducing you to the three main classes.
Much like MotorStorm, races are multiclass, pitting you against landspeeders, speeder bikes and, new for Galactic Racer, skim speeders on the same track.
Each class feels noticeably different. Webster compares the landspeeder to a rally car: it feels deliberately cumbersome, yet satisfyingly weighty as you drift around corners and slam opponents out of the way.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, speeder bikes are faster and boast tighter handling, while skim speeders can bank to navigate tighter turns and squeeze through narrow gaps.
“The reason we wanted all those [vehicle classes] together is that when you watch a Star Wars movie, that’s what you see,” said Crimmins. “You see all these vehicles interacting with each other. You’re in one ship, and it flies next to you. We wanted to create those moments in any race.”
Any fears of the vehicles feeling too floaty are dismissed as soon as you pick up the pad. There’s a fluidity and sense of weight to the controls that feels distinctly Criterion.
Navigating the tracks requires a different technique depending on the vehicle class, too. “There’s a different approach to your racing line,” Webster explained about balancing each vehicle class.
“If you just take a pure corner configuration of a racetrack, those racing lines are going to be quite different. They’re going to intersect at some point, and when they do that, fun ensues.”
Now this is podracing
Then there are the podracers. While hurtling around the Boonta Eve Classic circuit seen in the Phantom Menace at hundreds of miles an hour, their increased speed and skill requirement is stark – so much so that you can’t race them with other vehicle classes.
“They are the pinnacle of racing,” said Crimmins, adding that they are the “fastest and most technical vehicle” in the game.
“They’re so much more dangerous that it’s difficult to balance them. It was impossible to put them in the same space as the others. You can’t race an F1 car against my Volkswagen Golf, as much as I would enjoy seeing that.”
In the campaign, podracers will feature in dedicated events and be introduced to the story “in an interesting way.” Star Wars aficionados will recognise returning pilots, from Sebulba and Teemto Pagalies to Ody Mandrell and Gasgano, who verbally taunt you if you ram into them.
This fan service extends to the background creatures, too. Before a race starts, you might spot a Dewback or a Ronto stomping in the sand.
If you want to jump into a podracer immediately, they are unlocked in Arcade mode. For the first time, they can also be raced in online multiplayer, but we weren’t able to try this.
Cunningly, podracers were absent in the announcement trailer, before a later grand reveal. Fuse is keenly aware of their high demand, but this is more than a direct sequel to Star Wars Racer Revenge.
“We know that we couldn’t make a Star Wars racing game without leaning into the podracing,” Webster admitted. “But the opportunity was to do more.”
“Podracing is the pinnacle of racing, but hardly anyone can fly them. So let’s broaden racing in Star Wars as an activity and a sport. It’s been present in Star Wars since the start. So let’s lean into that and express racing inside this galaxy in a broader way than we’ve seen it before.”
Unsurprisingly, podracers are the most fragile vehicle class. They require a steeper learning curve, as clipping a wall at 300 mph will usually result in a spectacular crash. Vehicles break apart in slow-motion camera angles resembling a Burnout Takedown.
This is no coincidence, as the podracing scene partially inspired Burnout’s spectacular crashes.
“Those podracer crashes are a great reference point for how to make great-looking, exciting crashes,” Webster reflected. “It just so happened to be in cars at that time.”
Galactic Racer feels like a return to the aggressive, scrappy style of racing that defined Burnout games and is often missing in modern arcade games. Its inspiration is palpable.
Rogue racer
While the sci-fi racer is easy to pick up and play, repeated playthroughs reveal its hidden depths.
First, there are two independent boost systems. Afterburners act as a standard boost system and gradually refill. This is complemented by the Ramjet, which provides a more powerful boost.
This must be managed carefully, however, as it can overheat and explode if you exceed the Redline or land in Lantaana’s flowing lava. Conversely, flying through water cools your Ramjet down.
Lantaana is an all-new location for Galactic Racer, featuring tight forests, claustrophobic tunnels and massive jumps. One of the most memorable tracks has you racing through an active volcano.
Ando Prime, meanwhile, is another new location, filled with frozen pathways. Returning from The Force Awakens, the Jakku desert planet is more familiar, with you dodging fallen AT-AT Walkers. In contrast to ubiquitous open worlds, Galactic Racer’s focus on closed track racing is refreshing, rewarding players who master the layouts and shortcuts.
In a nice touch, both the Afterburner and Ramjet are manually activated in quick-time events before each race, followed by a minigame where you time your revs to get a speed boost off the line.
“You’ve got consequential decision-making and consequence in the racing. That’s something that’s been missing in racing games for a while,” said Webster. “Even crashing itself has been largely inconsequential.”
This focus on risk versus reward also carries over to the campaign, which adopts roguelite elements. Each act presents a randomised path of events to choose across different planets, from standard races to eliminator events and “mystery encounters.”
“We wanted to breathe some new life into racing,” Webster explained. “It’s largely been car collection structures for the last 10 or 15 years. Racing games thrive on replayability.”
Each racing tour requires a League Entry token to enter, which is lost if you wreck your vehicle after taking too much damage or fail to finish in the top three. Losing all your League Entry tokens requires you to restart the current tour.
After your vehicle is scrapped, credits and tuning points earned in events are retained, and can be used to upgrade your vehicle and start the next run in a better position.
The fastest ship in the galaxy
Before each event, you can roam around each planet’s paddock on foot, interacting with characters to immerse yourself in the world or shop for vehicle Parts and Upgrades.
Here, the extensive suite of customisation options could potentially keep returning players hooked. Alongside the ability to customise your vehicle’s cosmetics is an encouragingly deep upgrade system.
Upgrades let you improve up to six vehicle stats, including Cornering, Ramjet and Resilience. Some make your vehicle take more damage, while others increase your acceleration when using Afterburner.
On top of this, you can fit “hundreds” of Parts to gain advantages, from filling your Afterburner faster to increasing your Redline duration. Elsewhere, you can equip offensive or defensive Abilities such as Shields.
When combining these systems, the scope for building unique vehicles is enormous. Fuse claims that even the visual customisation has “close to nine million combinations” – and that’s not including paint and liveries.
“We’ve made games with fairly deep customisation and upgrades before,” said Crimmins. “We’ve never had the combinatorics of builds that we could build in this game. It’s in the trillions. There are builds in here that even I don’t know.”
With Fuse being an independent studio, it may not be able to match the production values of EA’s big-budget Burnout games, but the team’s passion for Star Wars and elbows-out arcade racing shines through.
Galactic Racer is shaping up to be the racing game that Star Wars fans have been waiting for. It combines WipEout-style hover racing with Burnout’s spectacle and MotorStorm’s multi-class events and cooldown systems, from a team with a proven pedigree.
Even if you’re not a Star Wars Fanatic, its visceral action and deep customisation could give futuristic and arcade racing a new lease of life. We don’t have a bad feeling about this.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches on 6th October for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. A Switch 2 version has yet to be announced, but it feels tailor-made for the platform – especially given Nintendo’s lineage with the Star Wars Racer series.
