Star Wars: Galactic Racer is the Best Arcade Racing Game in a Generation

And as brutal as you'd expect a roguelike mashup of Burnout and F-Zero to be

Racing game fans don't get a new release like Star Wars: Galactic Racer every day. We don't get one every year. Recently, we haven't even got one every console generation. We should savor it.

I'm not talking about the Star Wars licensing, even though this is the first Star Wars racing game since 2002. Although, now I mention it, we should savor that too. Galactic Racer sure makes the most of it, with its bombastic John Williams-esque orchestral soundtrack, its vivid cast of squabbling alien racers, its stark planetary biomes, and above all, the thrilling roars, flutters, and screams of its audio design. Speed never sounded so good as it does in Star Wars.

But for a certain kind of racing game fan, Galactic Racer is even more consequential than that. The genre is in desperate need of new ideas, and Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games — founded by former Criterion Games staff (Burnout, Need for Speed) — has plenty. There hasn't been a racing game this structurally innovative in a long, long time.

There hasn't been an arcade racer this good in even longer. Let me be clear about the genre distinction I'm drawing here: I consider Mario Kart and its imitators to belong to their own kart-racing subgenre, while Forza Horizon or The Crew sit at the approachable end of real-world driving games. When I talk about arcade racers, I mean games that are all about immediacy and velocity, where the brake pedal is a foreign object and where pure racing meets high-concept video-gamey mechanics, usually involving boost. Games like, well, Burnout.

Galactic Racer is more than a bit Burnout, as you'd expect, with its crashes and takedowns and focus on maintaining semi-permanent boost. As an anti-grav racer, it also takes a fair bit from F-Zero and Wipeout. Surprisingly, it might take more from the former, in its focus on sheer, blinding pace over a heavier sense of inertia. It's not that it doesn't have physics, it's that its racing craft are too fast for the laws of physics to properly register.

Galactic Racer is hard, innovative, and there's a lot going on

Yes, this is a purebred arcade racer. But it's also a roguelike (or a roguelite, to be exact). This is where things get really interesting. Galactic Racer has a run-based campaign structure that sees you undertake branching Tours of randomized events. Wrecking your craft with multiple crashes — or failing to make the top three in an Eliminator race, say — can send you all the way back to the start of a new Tour.

This game is also a quasi-RPG, where stat boosts, status effects, and buildcrafting all play a huge part. There's a wide range of playstyles you can assemble from its component parts. At the start of a run, you choose from three vehicle types, 14 racing styles with different traits and starting abilities, and game-modifying Favors. During a run, you earn new upgrades, abilities, and parts for your craft that enhance its abilities in specific conditions.

Those conditions add another vector to this complex web. Planetary conditions make a big difference to things like cornering and engine cooling; some courses thread through acid rivers that can disable your electrics if you're unshielded. Much of the game revolves around optimizing how you cycle between two boost mechanics, the safe Afterburner and the more dramatic Ramjet, which can blow you up if it overheats. A build focused on Ramjet cooling, allowing you to maintain its boost indefinitely, can be really powerful. But you might want to concentrate on shields, or offensive takedown abilities, or other areas instead.

As you can see, there's an awful lot going on here, both in the meta of a run and in the moment-to-moment of Galactic Racer's very fast-paced events. The game has little in the way of tutorials, which I think might be a mistake; you can be deep into it before you fully understand how you acquire certain status effects, what they do, and how best to exploit or negate them. It's the way of the roguelike to encourage players to discover its mysteries over the long haul, but this is an unfamiliar setting for that kind of game design, and it will leave many players struggling to catch up.

It's also a hard game. I'm a seasoned, if not highly skilled, player of racing games, and I found it a shock to the system. Crashing out of a run several events in, just because you hit the wall too many times on an unfamiliar track, feels brutal. The art style is evocative and very Star Wars, but its naturalism isn't overloaded with visual cues, and tracks can be hard to read at speed. The game's learning curve is steep, and there's a lot to manage and think about in a race.

But boy, when you get there, the rush is unmatched. This is a game of both blistering speed and tactical nuance, where smart use of your abilities is just as important as racing reflexes. It's a deep game system, and the further you get into a run, the better and more rewarding it gets.

Campaign is king, but multiplayer is a brilliant surprise

Galactic Racer's campaign mode is clearly what the game has been designed around, and it's a show-stopper. You play as Shade, a freelance pilot entering the Galactic Racing League and challenging an aristocratic champion whose family enslaves your people. Without going too heavy on story — which is usually a mistake in a racing game — the campaign offers lots of enjoyable Star Wars color and some memorable characters, including the stout, mustachioed alien who runs the racing league and acts as your avuncular backer. More to the point, the full roguelite structure gives the game's systems the room they need to breathe.

The other single-player modes are simpler. Scenarios are truncated, five-race tours starring some of the other racers, and worth doing just to fully understand some of the playstyle and build options. The Arcade is mostly time trials, and is the first (but not only) place you will encounter podracing, the inhumanly fast discipline featured in The Phantom Menace. (Yes, podracer supreme Sebulba is in the game, too.)

The pleasant surprise of the package is multiplayer, specifically Multiplayer Tour. This mode effectively condenses a campaign run into five races, with a build phase, during which you earn upgrades, parts, and abilities and slap an effective build together as best you can, capped off with a championship race that decides the result. It's spiced up by a betting system where you can reap extra rewards by predicting your own finishing places, and who will win overall. It's a brilliant, fresh take on online racing that is sure to find its fans, if Fuse Games can balance it in the wild.

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Star Wars fans with fond memories of Episode 1: Racer will love Galactic Racer's rich fan-service and handsome production values, but they might find its complexity and difficulty to be a rude — and initially confusing — awakening. Even racing game fans might be surprised how long they take to get accustomed to its uncompromising, unfamiliar design. But the reward for sticking with it is immense. It's the most original and exciting racing game in a generation.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer will be released on Oct. 6 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a prerelease download code provided by Secret Mode. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.