// PC GAMER — GAMING
Star Wars: Galactic Racer's singleplayer is a clever roguelike gauntlet I could easily sink hours into
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I recently had a chance to play a healthy chunk of the upcoming Star Wars: Galactic Racer, a—you guessed it—racing game where you can hop behind the seat of a handful of different vehicles: Landspeeders, a skim speeder, and speeder-bikes. There's also, naturally, podracing.
Each of these vehicles handles differently—landspeeders are the most consistent (they're basically just a car) and drift well, skim speeders are similar to land speeders, except they have a "knife's edge" mode that lets them tilt sideways to narrow their profile and dodge obstacles, and speeder-bikes are quicker with less control in the turns and, owing to being bikes, are more fragile.
I don't know the specifics of how podracers are tuned compared to landspeeders—but based on my experience, they're capable of both agile turns and breakneck speed, and you'll usually only be racing them against each other in specific arcade modes or multiplayer, though they do apparently pop up in the singleplayer campaign down the road.
I can't yet speak to the multiplayer, but I can talk about the game's singleplayer campaign, which has pleasantly surprised me in that hey, it's a roguelike, and I like those! Now, to those of you with roguelike fatigue, that might pull a groan from your weary chests—I am not one of those people. I am a wretched creature who loves meta-progression and repeat runs and incremental mastery, and I was having a ball.
The broad strokes: You play as Shade, a mysterious racer who has been called in to knock the socks off snooty nepo-baby Kestar Bool—bringing along your delightfully-accented mechanic, a four-armed lady named Hibi, and your ride. Which in true roguelike fashion starts out as a piece of junk.
To put Bool in his place, you're gonna need to complete galactic tours, and if you've played any roguelike before in your life, you know what's going on here. There are branching paths and you get a choice of three upgrades on occasion—the build variety of which is actually pretty in-depth.
Developer Fuse Games has done a bang-up job of stretching the game's core mechanics—drifting, boosting, a ramjet (a more aggro boost that can blow your speeder up if you're not careful), takedowns, and abilities like shields, flamethrowers, and so on—and finding ways to create builds around them.
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For example, in one run, I focused on fleshing out my ramjet's functionality, lowering its cooldown and combining that with an upgrade that instantly recharged my normal boost whenever my ramjet came online. But I also saw potential builds based around scoring takedowns and "redlining", which means existing in the danger zone of your ramjet's overheated state.