Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Byte Size Review

Long have I wanted a WipeOut game with a cast of characters and story grounded in its awesome sci-fi world.  For now, this WipeOut specific wish remains unfulfilled, but the Ex-Burnout devs at Fuse Games have delivered the next best thing; A Sci-Fi racer with some narrative meat on its bones, all in a Star Wars skin…. and it is a triumph.

I played as “Shade” a pretty generic, customisable player character who is a avatar for my journey in the Galactic Racing League. The skeleton of the story is that there is a rich bad-guy named Kestar Boon who is running rough-shot over the league and its organiser. Shade has been brought in upset his apple-cart.

Think a Star Wars Burnout with control systems like WipeOut!

With the help of mechanic Hibi and sponsor rewards, Shade has to climb the league tables in order to reach a win-it-all race with Kestar Boon. To make this premise a bit more interesting, there is some wider lore around Kestar Boon’s species being the oppressive overlords of Shade species on their home planet. So, on top of the sporting rivalry, there is a deeper, underlying grudge between the two characters which is hinted at throughout the game’s story.

There are speeders, bikes and skim speeders to choose from and level up. But to say vehicle choice and driving skill is the be all and end all would be a gross misrepresentation of this game. Galactic Racers is a Rogue-like racer! Yes, that’s right. The Cottages’ most universally disliked genre by far, but there you have it!

But in spite of its terrible genre, this is still an excellent game. Now to be clear, the Rogue-like elements are not additive to the experience- not at all. It is still punitive, unfair and makes success at times, totally random, which in a racing game should be a death-blow. But not for this game. It’s just that good.

The rogue-like stuff works in a very similar to Slay the Spire: you choose one of several different pathways to reach the final encounter (which, in this case, is a “boss race”). But you only have one league ticket, maybe two if you get a bonus one from a surprise story encounter. That means if you fail to finish a race, or lose a no-lose race…thats it!

Your run is over and you have to start all those races again.

I hate fail-states that are designed to force failure in order to extend the experience, and my opinion hasn’t change on this. But, unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of fail-states that Galactic Racer uses.

The controller-snapping fury I experienced when I got to the end of a boss race- having won 10 races in a row while getting here- only to be beaten by a boss with unfair speed, offensive capabilities and ridiculous rubber banding, made the whole undertaking feel like an act in futility. There was no chance I was going to win- I was made to lose for the sake of extending the game’s runtime. And I despise that.

I know the expectation is the lose, level up, build into a style of racer and come back for more. But I still struggle with the underlying punitive nature of this genre. If it wasn’t for the feel of the racers, the speed, the great tracks and the cool story, I would snap the controller in half and uninstall.

There’s also the fact that, in order to be “strong” enough to beat the boss, I had to become terribly overpowered in the other races I partook in to get there. Thus, I wasn’t levelling up in order to win all the races; I was levelling up only to beat the boss. This impacts the intent of a game like this, where every race should be a tense, thrilling experience.

But all these rogue-like gripes aside, this is still a great game. The Star Wars atheistic is faultless, the gameplay is sublime and the build-crafting is deep. To put it simply, the feeling of whipping across a planets surface at 500km/hr, watching other vehicles smash into a hail of sparks and scrap just never gets old! I loved it.