Ebontis

Star Wars Galactic Racer – REVIEW Fuse Games has managed to bring the crashes from Burnout, the feeling of speed from the over-the-top NOS-infused Need for Speed games of old, and merged it with the Star Wars universe of vehicles that hover just about a foot off the ground and jet around at unfathomable speeds for mere earthlings. The visual details of each planet and care poured into every corner of these courses will keep your eyes glued to the screen and your finger locked onto the accelerator. The unique system of a run-based campaign adds an intensity and risk to every twist and turn. Sights and sounds that feel pulled from the movies and a progression system full of careful part and upgrade choices to craft the speeder that fits your playstyle and allows the last few races in a tour run to feel wildly different than the first. Add in plenty of challenges, arcade races, and multiplayer tours, and you have a Star Wars racer that will keep you honing your skills for a long time ahead in a galaxy far, far away. Starting off straight away with how the game looks, nothing short of stunning every time I’d head off to a new destination or load into a race. Each environment is about as distinct as you could dream up, which does wonders to keep up the feeling of traveling to different planets in the galaxy. The creators of Burnout are somewhere baked into the code as well because these crashes are as over the top as ever at these sci-fi speeds. Photo mode will get used a lot, and I can’t wait to see the clips of crashes and close finishes that come out after launch. I was lucky enough to play at 4k/60 on my PC, and I can confirm it ran a locked 60 the whole time with my settings pushed rather high. I mean I don’t know if I can recall even a stutter, just fast-paced racing action. I’m never a good barometer of all systems since mine is rather powerful, but if you can find the right settings for your platform, I think it’s going to be very smooth. The ears are honored as well in Galactic Racer with audio that could have been pulled straight out of the movies. There is a very iconic racer who brings a very distinct sound to the podracing section of this game, and I had to go rewatch a quick bit of episode 1 to compare… no surprise, they nailed it. The sound of each vehicle, the ambiance of the world around you, and voice chatter while you are racing bring this whole game to life in a way I didn’t expect but happily enjoyed. I’ll talk a bit about the story in a spoiler-free way later, but the voice work is excellent and just about the right amount to feel complementary to the experience but not overly forced. So the senses are in for a treat, but how about the gameplay…. The Campaign is the BIG focus. You start picking how your character looks with some basic choices for your driver, and then after your first run you’ll have a choice of pilot style perks, favors for passive benefits, and vehicle type. The Speeder, Bike, or Skimmer are your options, and each will suit different players. I locked in on the Speeder, but I saw plenty of bikes in Multiplayer, so I think it’s going to be all about feel. Once you have all that locked in, you’ll travel to the first planet of that run. The way it works is you will have a sponsor for each run. Early on, Darius will get you the initial token, but as things progress, you’ll actually get what you’d see as corporate backers with certain mini driving maneuvers or tasks they want you to focus on for each planet. Then, with the money you have from the sponsor or after each planet’s events, you’ll land on a new planet and talk to your mechanic to check on upgrades you can purchase. You also may need to repair some parts to avoid faults on your Speeder. Parts, abilities, or random stat packs where you pick one of a few stats to put some points into. After a race, you also have a chance to get parts or stat upgrades, so while each planet initially has an upgrade, every race or activity brings the possibility of improvements to your racer. The most important currency is your league race token. You’ll typically just have 1, but there are ways to have more than one depending on favors and some other situational moments; more often than not, it’s just 1. In a normal Race, if you wreck the max number of times, you will lose your token. In an Elimination, if you don’t finish in the top 3 and get eliminated mid-race, you lose your token, and there are even other ways you’ll risk your token later on in the story, but that Token is always your key to entry. If you have crashed, say 2 out of your 3 lives, then you may race slower just to try and cross the finish line for that one event, even if it means a lower place, fewer rewards, and even losing a sidebet. Continuing is more important than winning a little cash in the overall tour run. I wonder how this whole “run” based system will land with everyone, but I can tell you it cranks the feeling of having to lock in for some of those later racers to 11 and then some. Types of racing are decently varied. You have scenarios with certain characters of the league, Arcade racing where you’ll find the podracing, and Multiplayer, which got intense quickly once some of us early reviewers got comfortable with their preferred play style. And then the Galactic League tour, where the campaign takes place, is the big spectacle. I beat the campaign on Pilot, which is recommended, but there is a difficulty above that, and then one more you must unlock by completing the campaign. After you finish a full campaign run, whether you get to the end or not, you will earn upgrade points for basic stat upgrades to your vehicle, which will allow you to start each new tour stronger than before, up to the MAX starting level for each vehicle type. Each tour is a fresh starting point outside of those basic stat improvements, so most of your progress and speeder build will be comprised of upgrades, parts and abilities you acquire during your league run from races, eliminations and other activities. How you feel at the start of the game to even how a fresh run will feel in a max BASE level speeder, is noticeably different, but how you can feel at the end of a full run is truly pushing ground-based speed racing to its limit. The sense of speed you can feel when your RamJet is pushing into the redline, and every turn and adjustment feels like you are dancing on a knife's edge, really requires full attention, to say the least. When you get into podracing mode, you take that dance and try and do it with something that feels like a jet engine attached to toothpicks and tissue paper; one wrong move will lead to a very quick loss of place and many times an entertaining crash animation of your parts spinning wildly out of control. The way the courses work is that you’ll have a planet with usually about 4 races or mixed activities. Each planet will present environmental issues to contend with, like dust choking out your engine on Crait or Corrosive Pools on Sentinel One that will cut off your Boosts or wreck your Speeder in no time flat. Shields can help with the corrosion, and being in the lead keeps others from choking out your vents, but outside of Jakku and Lantaana, these races have their obstacles built right into the track. Ando Prime risks freezing your speeder, but warming tunnels help clear the buildup of ice, so careful maneuvers at breakneck speed can thaw your vehicle; but sometimes the angle isn’t worth the crash risk, so you turn into a bald tire on a patch of black ice and hope to slide your way to safety eventually. So the balancing act of survival is just in reach, but you will have to be both offensive and defensive with your piloting around every corner to cross the finish line. I couldn’t ask for much more, but I think the one thing that is missing for me personally is just a practice mode. Especially once I’ve unlocked a track orientation on a specific planet, if I’m struggling with a certain area, it would be great to be able to put in some clean laps and look for shortcuts or compare time trials or something. Hopefully it’s a future addition or something they can add from feedback; who knows. Time Trials and racing against your friends list would be cool, but honestly it’s trying to decipher what is coming up on the course between everything going on that can be the real challenge at times. I beat the campaign on Normal/Pilot, but you’d need some mastery to push for that highest difficulty for sure, and practice modes of some kind would help that a ton. It’s the little things though that keep it interesting – Activating your abilities with the button combinations before each race to get the initial activation at the start. Side betting in podracing because of course there would be. Back channel talk between the racers about Kester Bool and. Photo mode is beautiful at most times so make sure you spend a little time putting a couple good screenshots together. The small stuff around the edges is complemented by the campaign story and surrounding cast. While the racing is, of course, the central focus, especially with other modes than just the campaign, the characters like your mechanic alone fill out the game's world to be more than just a few laps around a circuit. Whether it’s the pompous, spoiled-rotten, high-and-mighty rich kid of Kester Bool, your loyal supporter Darius Pax, or a very cool surprise character making a return to Star Wars racing, all the pilot and NPC interactions were a pleasant surprise. The sponsors have to be a bit repetitive due to your continued interaction with them every run, but even the robot, for example, was about as dry as you’d hope a robot would be so they didn’t shortchange any of the voice work from what I could tell. By the time I saw the credits roll on just the campaign alone, I knew this was a special experience. The intensity of the run-based campaign and the balance of keeping you pushing to go as fast as you can while keeping that risk of too many crashes or crucial podium placements is engineered to near perfection. The incentive to venture outside of comfortable and into that redline territory is always there, just testing if you will take that next turn a bit faster or craft a speeder build that could be unconventional until it works. Some of the course paths are hard to discern at first and I’d love a practice mode to get a better feel for shortcuts and handling secrets to some of these vehicles, this is a pretty amazing package of lean forward in your seat racing as only an arcade-style Star Wars racer could do. Amazing - 9/10 Thank you @Fuse_Games, @YRSTRULYUK and @WeAreSecretMode for the early access to create this review.