Star Wars: Galactic Racer is being developed by Fuse Games, a studio founded in 2023 by former veterans from Criterion Games, who worked on the Burnout games I love so dearly, so that was at least 90% of the reason I was interested in checking this out, with the Star Wars IP rounding out the other 10%. The queue to play was rather short on the 3rd day of Gamescom, so I had a sit down to see what we can expect later this year.
The Demo started by asking me which vehicle I wanted to race with, out of four options. I chose the podracer as it was the most iconic for me in this context. Weirdly, it’s only after picking your ride that you’re forced to play a short tutorial with the other three, which is a weird sequence to do things in, but ok. To my surprise, though, all 4 of the options controlled pretty much identical. Which makes me even more confused about why they put so much emphasis on the different options in this demo.
The four options are: a landspeeder, a speederbike, a skim speeder and a podracer. The demo made me control all 4 in a row, Other than the skim speeder curving a little more tightly and the speederbike being worse at ramming, I hardly noticed a difference. Speaking of ramming, you press the trigger to boost, but you have to press R3 to switch between a regular boost and a ramming type of boost, which was just super awkward to control.
Screenshots I had seen of the game looked spectacular, but the demo made me race through pretty boring sand dunes, so it wasn’t exactly the best showcase of the game’s splendour. I have no reason to believe the full game will not look like the screenshot below; it was just another weird choice to have the demo be the most visually boring level in the game.
With my podracer, I was also given another offensive move with flamethrowers spewing fire from the sides, which I hope means we’ll see more unique abilities for certain rides. And I also hope they do some really unique things with the game, like, for example, having Tusken Raiders sniping at you from the dunes, triggered like it would be in Split/Second. But from the Gamescom demo, it felt like just a pretty straightforward racing game with the Star Wars IP on top, and I hope the full release proves me wrong. I’m also happy to see this will get a story mode, as SCREAMER recently showed us that racing + narrative is not an impossible mix.
Robby lives and breathes video games. When he’s not playing them, he’s talking about them on social media or convincing other people to pick up a controller themselves. He’s online so often, he could practically list the internet as his legal domicile. Belgian games-industry know-it-all.
