Star Wars: Galactic Racer has a lot more Slay the Spire DNA than I expected, because its ex-Burnout devs wanted to add 'real consequence' to each race

Don't call Galactic Racer "Podracer" in front of its developers—they'll politely point out that their new game is about multiple types of racing in the Star Wars universe, and it is not a sequel to 1999's Episode 1 Racer, despite featuring podracing's most iconic characters and courses. At first this feels like splitting hairs to mollify the strict branding watchdogs of the Walt Disney Corporation, but play a few minutes of the new racer and the distinction starts to make more sense.

Galactic Racer's campaign mode has more in common with Slay the Spire than it does the last major Star Wars racing game—but instead of slinging cards, you're strapping yourself to a rocket going 300 miles per hour.

"We have been making racing games for a long time," Fuse Games creative director Kieran Crimmins said in an interview with PC Gamer at Summer Game Fest. "One of the things we always wanted to bring to racing games in general is a bit more consequence. Your decisions matter, your build matters, the way you play matters, the style you choose matters. I'm not knocking other racing games, there are fantastic racers that are more in that chill space, quite zen. But we wanted something that had real consequence."

Galactic Racer's campaign starts you out at the bottom rung of an underground racing league: before you work your way up to the majors and get to clamber onto a podracer, you'll be flying speeder bikes, landspeeders and skim speeders, which each handle a bit differently but are still faster than the cars in all but the arcadiest of terrestrial racing games. The story follows Hades' lead in returning you to a small outpost between tournaments, where there are a few characters to make idle chat with each time.

The "consequence" comes into play once you jump into a racing league. Here Galactic Racer gives you a selection of races that looks just like Slay the Spire's now-ubiquitous map screen: pick a route through various race types and differing courses, which could be set in day or night and raced forwards or backwards. Wipe out before finishing the league, and you've got to start over—but you'll still earn progress towards a swath of unlocks and pocket some credits to spend on improved parts.

"That's where that structure comes from: it's kind of a roguelike, run structure, which allows us two things," Crimmins said. "You have to build well as well and race well so that you can continue, so your decisions matter. Every line you take matters because the environment has effects on the build.

"Your pure skill matters as well, but on the other side it means that you allow the combinatorics to make racing experience and racing builds that you don't see in other games. An unbelievable amount of options to customize each one of those vehicles, and not just visually, but in the way the build works, the synergies of things that go on there."

I jumped into Galactic Racer on the harder ace difficulty, because I want the experience of piloting a frictionless jet engine through scrapyards and alien canyons to feel dangerous. I got my wish: I crashed out of my first racing league a couple courses in. I made it deeper into my second and third, which gave me a sense of how much variation there really is at play here.

By equipping my landspeeder with a shield ability, for example, I could save myself from otherwise-deadly collisions, and using it enough times across a few races would allow me to unlock a better shield as well as a secondary "racing style" to change my build strategy for a future run. If I swapped out the shield for the Ramjet ability, I could careen past other racers with a sustained turbo boost—but at the higher risk of wiping myself out with one crash.

The one downside to this structure I noticed in an hour-long demo was that failing a league meant having to run the same handful of courses repeatedly before being able to move on to new tracks; that limitation exists in other racing games too, to some extent, but usually with a bit more flexibility to move on to a new course before you've earned a gold medal or whatever.

"From a progression point of view, it's probably more about track knowledge than it is upgrades," Crimmins said. "If you know the tracks, it's not too difficult to get through the planets, and that is the motivation of it: you want to get to the next planet, see what it's about, further the story each time. But you probably need to pick the difficulty that's right for you to get on that curve, which is why we have multiple options, so that it's still accessible to people coming in at different levels."

Well, that's me roasted. But of the slate of racing games coming out this year and next, from Forza Horizon 6 to Clutch to Hot Wheels, this is the one that, surprisingly, has me the most interested. It's too early to say if the parts tinkering will end up feeling meaningful or if the story will deliver anything beyond a thin veneer of Days of Thunder tropes, but no other racer right now is combining this many ideas with this many types of vehicles that go this fast.

In the meantime, I'm eyeing this Episode 1 Racer sale on GOG. It costs about a penny per mile per hour.

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