Star Wars Galactic Racer is surprisingly deep and pod racing at its finest

"I don't know why," Kieran Crimmins, Creative Director at Fuse Games, told me when I asked why he thinks no-one has made a Star Wars racing game in a long time. To me, it seems like an obvious win for a lot of studios, and having got an hour of hands-on time with Star Wars Galactic Racer at SGF, the developers behind Need for Speed and Burnout have done a phenomenal job with it.

"I'd say that it's a very difficult type of game to do from a development skill point of view… we were ready to make a new game, and that was one of the most obvious ones," Crimmins continues. They know what they're doing when it comes to racing games, being led by a lot of ex-Criterion senior developers.

It's the scale of the Galactic Racer's locations that amazed me more than anything else. Even though there are defined boundaries, they've been cleverly woven into the wider planets, so you often feel like you're racing in massive open spaces. Moon-sized ships loom large over the horizon, and the desert of Jakku rolls off into the distance as you speed between wrecks. The sense of wonder you get is unrivaled for a racing game, which fits the world of Star Wars perfectly.

Crimmins explained how important that was to the Fuse Games team. "One of the classic kinds of cinematic things is that everything is big; it literally doesn't fit on the screen. So we just tried to replicate that, really. So, all the tracks are absolutely massive mega structures." Everything I played looked incredible visually.

However, you don't get a lot of time to marvel at your surroundings. Galactic Racer is an intense experience. It's not a simple accelerate-and-brake racing game. This isn't Burnout. There's a boost, a kinetic boost for certain speeder types, and a whole pre-race preparation quick-time event that lets you boost without having to wait for it to recharge, and even combat to think about. Winning races is a real battle, and you need to use everything at your disposal to come out on top. It's fast and frenetic, which makes the action consistently fun.

Fuse Games has "a kind of mantra: pick up and play, so you know, easy to learn, hard to master kind of thing," Crimmins tells me. You can have a lot of fun messing around in the single-race modes, but getting through the campaign while building a speeder that fits your style is a lot trickier.

The team wanted "all those extra systems and different vehicles to represent the breadth of vehicles," and to ensure you're experimenting with the best builds possible. As you work through Galactic Racer's interestingly roguelike-esque story mode, you'll wander around hub areas in third-person, get invested in a brand-new Star Wars plot, and choose between a variety of parts and upgrades to improve your speeder. Those parts can upgrade your speeder's stats, improve your boost, or make your chassis more durable. "The combinations are in the trillions for different builds," I was told. Fuse Games wants to "encourage people to experiment, whereas, in like a [racing] traditional game, you will build up your car to the top, and then you will win everything." Even from my short time with the game, it's clear that you'll want to tinker with your speeder all the time, making changes for each event type and location. Improvement is much more involved, and that's rare for a racing game.

Causing your opponents to crash is immensely enjoyable, too. I can see hints of Burnout Paradise and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit in the presentation of said crashing, and there's a very satisfying ding sound when you take someone out. It sounds authentically Star Wars, but also makes you want to be a bit of a menace on track.

That's even more the case in Galactic Racer's pod racing. It's something Star Wars fans have wanted for a long time, and Fuse knows it has to get it right. Thankfully, it feels great, the action being significantly faster and more intense than the standard racing. "You cannot have a Star Wars racing game without pod racing in it. Pod racing has got to embody the fantasy that's displayed in those movies. It's the pinnacle of racing; it's the pinnacle of racing in Star Wars," Crimmins said, and he's not wrong. It's promising that the studio knows that, and I'm interested to see how prominent a role it plays in the story mode.

Star Wars Galactic Racer isn't just a wonderful representation of racing in a Star Wars world, but it's a racing game with some truly unique features. The complex racing mechanics, the unique structure of the campaign mode, and the deep upgrade system all make for a far more engaging game than I expected. This isn't a game for people who like to just hold the accelerator button and relax, which is both surprising and exciting.