// PC GAMER — GAMING
Star Wars: Galactic Racer review – Run-based bash racer with Burnout-style takedowns
As a way of shaking up the racing game format, the run-based structure of Galactic Racer is more successful than the open world of Burnout Paradise.
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What is it?: Arcade racing with the Star Wars sauce.Expect to pay: $60/£50Developer: Fuse GamesPublisher: Secret ModeReviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060Multiplayer?: YesSteam Deck: UnknownLink: Steam
The Star Wars movies have always had a mashup quality. You take some dogfighting from The Dam Busters, some swordfighting from old samurai movies, the saloon scene from a western, and you mix 'em up real good. That's how you make one (1) Star War. There's nothing wrong with that—when The Phantom Menace threw the chariot-racing from Ben Hur into the mix, it ended up being easily one of the best parts of the movie.
While Episode 1 Racer managed to recreate that specific scene just fine, as soon as you left Tatooine the quality dropped. Star Wars: Galactic Racer sets its aim higher than recreating just one scene, and instead imagines an entire racing culture flourishing in the peacetime gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, where crime syndicates back planet-hopping hotshots who race landspeeders, speeder bikes, and skim speeders across planets that conveniently have one biome each.
That worldbuilding helps populate a cast of rivals—the villainous Kestar Bool is immediately hateable, so well done there—including an ex-TIE Fighter pilot and a bunch of rich kids who could be real-life Formula One drivers if they weren't blue or speaking Huttese.
These characters populate the paddock you walk across every few races on your way to the upgrade monkey and they insult you during the races, though since half of those insults are in subtitled alien language I didn't pay much attention to them. If you've got time to read subtitles when you're hurling through a cavern at 450 km/h, good for you.
It's arcade racing, of course. A bit like Wipeout only instead of losing all your speed the second you touch the sides you either scrape along for a bit or bounce off or explode in a way that'll be familiar from the Burnout games. Galactic Racer studio Fuse Games was founded by a bunch of ex-Criterion developers who worked on the Burnout series as well as helping DICE with the modern Star Wars Battlefront games, so that explains that.
When you slam another racer into a wall the takedown camera pans over to give you a proper slow-motion look at their greebly Star Wars vehicle being reduced to the kind of scrap Jawas would turn their nose up at, though unlike Burnout 3 the computer isn't great at steering for you while that happens. More than once I came out of a takedown to discover the CPU was aiming me directly at a wall at high speed.
Takedowns are a much less significant part of Galactic Racer than I expected. I thought this would, like Burnout 3, be a string of high-speed crashes with some brief bits of racing in between. Instead, it's an actual racing game—albeit one where a crocodile-faced alien will occasionally rocket into a wall and be engulfed in flame.