There’s a surprising amount of common ground between the single player and multiplayer sides of Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Just like in the run-based roguelite structure of the story campaign, heading online for either speeder racing or pod racing which will see you chasing results and cooking up your best loadouts, all with an eye to snatch the winner’s trophy at the end of a mini tournament.
Quick races are there for players to drop in for a quick five minute blast, but the main events are the speed and pod racing tours, taking you on a 30-minute whistlestop trip across the galaxy to find out who’s best. Once again, this isn’t a traditional league system, but one that takes two leaves out of the book of American sports: a winner-takes-all finale and institutional gambling.
OK, so bear with me. You’ve got six races in a tour, but it’s really only the final one that matters to decide the overall winner. You could win all the previous races, but if you crash a few times and trundle home sixth in the finale, meanwhile, another racer will get to live out their “any given Sunday” style underdog or comeback story.
But there is a good reason to race your hardest through the earlier stages to build up the best loadout possible. Before the lights go out in the first race, you’ll have to gamble on where you think you’ll finish – top 9, top 6 and top 3 for the speeder racing – with boosted rewards for getting this right. You can also mark another racer as your rival to try and beat them, and then pick up a Backer Contract which will have various micro-goals like spending time at the front or back of the field, get perfect landings, Ramjet into the danger zone multiple times.
That all gives you more options between races, to spend earnings on modifiers, abilities and to boost your stats. It’s all about finding the mods that will work well together, just as in the single player campaign, but the process is accelerated here with stat points handed out more quickly and greater winnings. The odds-on favourite isn’t always the person that’s won the most races, but can lean into completing those Backer objectives to give a little further boost.
It’s a great structure that solves some of the fickle nature of gamers in online competition. How many times have you seen someone up and quit a tournament after biffing it in the first race and deciding there’s no point anymore? Here, both with sensible betting as you figure out the pecking order, you can still give yourself a shot at either a win or a good payout from betting on the eventual winner.
And look, to blow my own space horn, I was the eventual winner in my skim speeder with some miraculous comebacks, always going all-in to bet on myself, and making it back through the field after some early crashes. My build morphed to accentuate the Ramjet, so that by the finale (another race where I had to chase a distant leader), I could boost and boost and boost for ages, and use the skim speeder’s tight cornering ability to my advantage.
I wasn’t quite so amazing in the podracers, though. Now with a field of 8 racers instead of 12, and with character-led vehicles, I picked the fast but cumbersome Quadranius just for the joy of racing as someone that’s a giant face with arms and legs. Going all-in on my bets didn’t pay off early, and I was getting pipped to the line, when previously I was the one pipping.
Also, I gambled on adding a part that promised a 60% chance of the Ramjet resetting instead of exploding, and then upgraded that to 75%. Four back-to-back explosions and I felt like FUSE had deliberately chosen to teach me a lesson about gambling and odds.
But Star Wars Galactic Racer has the potential to be a very special game. It takes a lot to go up against the nostalgic fandom for the cult classic Star Wars Episode I: Racer, but across the single player and multiplayer alike, FUSE has brought a thoroughly fresh perspective, not just for racing in a galaxy far, far away, but for arcade racing in general.