Among the many pleasant surprises at last year’s The Game Awards was the reveal of Star Wars: Galactic Racer. There hasn’t been a Star Wars racing game of suitable quality since Star Wars Episode 1: Racer. Suffice it to say, the void needed filling, and the fact that it includes pod racing as well is all the more fitting.
However, it’s developed by Fuse Games, comprised of former Criterion developers with no shortage of experience on open-world titles such as Burnout. Even with the popularity of the genre in the racing space (see: Forza Horizon), it opted for a more track-focused approach because it not only fit the Star Wars universe but offered that “replayability loop that expands over time.”
“The reason we’re a track-based racer is because we wanted to have that replayability loop that expands over time,” said creative director Kieran Crimmins to IGN. “All those benefits people learn in the tracks, the more they play, learning the handling, that familiarity getting them better rather than just a massive smorgasbord of a thing, which is a slightly different kind of ‘play with the toys’ experience.
“This is high consequence, high action, high replayability and something that creates player stories that you wouldn’t have seen in other games. And I don’t think we could do that if we would go in and say, okay, we’re also going to do this open world thing. That’s a whole set of different challenges.”
Studio CEO and founder Matt Webster agreed. “You can also say, well, this is the Galactic League, right? This is sport, and we’ve seen racing as an activity and as a sport in Star Wars has been around in many forms, right? Episode 1’s podracing we all know and love, Bad Batch’s riot racing in Season 2 was just awesome. Star Wars Resistance has got the Aces and low-altitude starfighter racing. Racing as a sport and activity is something that’s inside Star Wars, and tracks lend themselves to that really well at an action level. And the other thing we realize more broadly is we are inside Star Wars. And Star Wars fans crave the characters and a story.
“So we wanted to go there as well, in a way that frames the racing action. So, you play as a character who is racing, as opposed to it being a racing game. We’ve made plenty of racing games where you’re just a faceless silhouette in a car. Now you’re inhabiting Shade, you’re a canonical new Star Wars character. You walk down one of the shots in the trailer, you’re walking down the ramp of your starship, you’re going into a paddock.
“And this is a really interesting addition here where the paddock gives us a place, a low-intensity space where we can get up close with our Star Wars stuff, we can move a narrative on, we can see characters inside there. It gives us a low-intensity space as a counterpoint and a contrast to the super high-intensity racing. And I think it’s a really important distinction for us now as we call this a racing adventure.”
Regarding Shade, they’re hired by the Galactic League’s founder, Darius Pax, to help take down Kestar Bool, the current frontrunner (and general no-good scum). Interestingly, they also have an axe to grind against Bool, the reasons we’ll likely find out over the course of the campaign.
As for the tracks that players will race on, they include locations like Sentinel One, Ando Prime and Jakku. While you can choose from different classes, there’s also a heavy emphasis on modifying your vehicle and making it your own.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches later this year for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Check out the first gameplay trailer here.
