Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a game of empty calories. I was shocked by how poor a time I had with it—how, of all feelings a game like this could evoke, it was a source of boredom. Turns out going fast and making a lot of noise doesn’t amount to much if everything surrounding the cockpit is vapid and stupid.
A glorious genre
I always loved arcade racers, chiefly because I can’t drive. Count me in anytime the wall makes for a viable brake. I grew up with the old Need for Speed games, the ones the franchise no longer even shows on its website: think High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed, and, many years later, the original Most Wanted. These fit in snugly alongside super-fun childhood titles like LEGO Racers 2, Re-Volt, Trackmania—and, of course, Star Wars Episode I Racer. Even these days, I gladly take the latest Forza Horizon for a spin, or load up Wreckfest for a bit of fun with friends.
I respect those who can tame virtual cars in a sim—or even real ones on a real track—but I’ll typically stick to experiences where turning a vehicle doesn’t come at the cost of my soul.
So I figured Galactic Racer is a safe preorder: even if it’s mid, surely I’ll enjoy the spectacle. And by all accounts, it wasn’t going to be mid: previews and reviews were very positive, and my esteemed colleague Andrej Barovic’s take on the game genuinely had me hyped. I even liked what I saw from a bunch of videos, and I loved the idea of incorporating roguelike elements.
Then I got to play the game for myself, and… oh boy. It was like watching The Phantom Menace for the first time—Jar-Jar included. I didn’t make it past the refund time limit with this one, so consider this a tale of first and last impressions.
The illusion of racing
I cannot in good conscience call this a racing game, because these “races” are not races at all. Before we even start our engines: it is unacceptable that you can’t rebind the controls for a racing game in the year 2026. The control schemes are unintuitive and poorly thought-out for controller and keyboard alike, which compounds the problem with what I will from now on call Galactic “Racer.”
Each “race” takes less time than listening to the Star Wars theme, clocking in at around two and a half minutes: it’s mere ephemera. Gaining or losing an individual position is also meaningless because of everyone boosting all the time. Did the devs take their cue from this year’s controversial F1 engine regulations, where no pass matters but there are sure a lot of them?
Instead of heft, we get throwaway characters emoting random, cheesy macho lines in a combat racing game, which was boring even back in 1995 when Slipstream 5000 did it after booting from an MS-DOS console command.
It’s vapid, contextless trash that quickly goes from unfunny to annoying to SHUT THE FUCK UP. The cheesy lines don’t reflect the stakes of the racing league or the risks of this high-speed illegal action. And what am I supposed to say when the grizzled “racer” just goes, “Well, there’s always next time”?
The weightlessness also carries over to the wrecks. The massive explosive accidents in Galactic “Racer” would be significantly more impressive if characters didn’t just shrug them off and immediately return into the fray—on multiple occasions, too, until they randomly don’t, because gameplay. Blowing up over and over again doesn’t even leave a scratch, as it’s all removed between tracks—give those Pit Droids a raise!
As it is, it’s pure ludonarrative dissonance, empty spectacle. You can choose between the long cinematic camera taking control away from you and stopping the action for multiple seconds, or turning it off and realizing that collisions with fellow competitors feel absolutely weightless, like mushing two cheap Matchbox cars against one another. Without the action cam cutaways—which, mind you, are around twice as long as the ones in Burnout Paradise used to be, genuinely taking you out of the action—you wouldn’t even know someone crashed out without the notices in the top right corner.
And that’s just what’s on the track. Unfortunately, I have to spend half my time in the paddock, forced to listen to endless copies of Jar-Jar Binks.
I’m a read-everything sort of person in games, so much so that I struggle to take on complex open-world titles, knowing full well I’d accidentally miss something. (It’s the same reason I still haven’t finished Disco Elysium despite loving it.) So understand the weight of my words here: I’ve never skipped cutscenes and dialogue so vigorously as I have in Galactic “Racer,” a game whose writing team seems to have come from an alternate dimension where the script of The Phantom Menace won an Oscar and Jar-Jar became more popular than lightsabers, Darth Vader, or the concept of pancakes.
From the opening cutscene’s exposition dump by the big fat league host to the clichéd testosterone-tossing villain, and especially the unbearably annoying idiot little mechanic that confuses “incompetent” with “endearing,” I hated every syllable of the prose I was subjected to. Was this written for four-year-olds hopped up on too much TikTok, with a gameplay style to match, I wonder? Considering how the game repeatedly tutorializes that you have to press the Accelerate button to accelerate, that might very well be the case.
Also, unless it’s hiding a loading screen, can you stop taking the piss with the repeated, entirely unnecessary A NEW TOUR BEGINS screen at the start of a run? The menus and assorted junk create so much friction for someone who might enjoy the racing portion of the game…
All the things that could have been
As you can garner from my refund-compatible playtime, I didn’t get to deeply engage with the roguelite portion of Galactic “Racer.” I’m sure there are interesting synergies to explore, but the game lost me at the first instance with a basic tenet of roguelites I personally despise. I love the genre but hate it when progression is baked into permanent stat boosts rather than varied unlocks or added challenges. It means I can never tell what I’m intended or expected to be able to do with my current character, and it destroys any satisfaction I might get from achieving a gameplay goal.
Did I have a good run, or did I merely grind enough to get a fast enough speeder where winning was trivial? Am I ahead of the curve or behind it? Did I get meaningfully better at Galactic “Racer” or just achieved the inevitable victory I would have anyway by gaining enough stats? And if my starting vehicle is gimped to the point I have no chance of winning the run by raw skill, why, pray tell, are you wasting my gameplay time?
All this is such a shame, because I love some of the ideas on offer here. Revisiting those old arcade racers I mentioned always made me think a roguelike version would shore up so many of their shortcomings in the eyes of a modern player with their weaksauce AI and repetitive gameplay. But I was approaching it from the other direction, with challenges and traps rather than a grindfest where you play for a power fantasy. You can’t repair your car, can’t take shortcuts, start half a lap down, start 20 points down in the championship, that sort of thing. Apart from a handful of events, this is not the sort of experience Galactic “Racer” builds out with its roguelike formula.
And the notion of spending time with your fellow racers outside the track is also smart. It would let the game flesh them out and make them matter in a way an arcade game often can’t do, since the subgenre often forgoes narrative of a long tournament for the repeated rush of starting at the back and climbing to the top of the grid in short races. It would, if the characters and their dialogue weren’t mind-numbing, which is an especially big loss here, since Galactic “Racer” makes the vehicular contest itself feel meaningless.
That doesn’t leave much to enjoy about the game, does it? So I went to the Refundmobile.
What a car crash. At least it’s easy to look away.
