Racing games exist in this sort of limbo within the industry where no one is really sure what makes one great. Is it the number of vehicles available to the player? The depth of their customizability? The vehicle handling? The maps? The story, if there even is one? And to which extent do any of these improve or detract from a racer? No one really knows.
And they shouldn’t know. For what they are at their core, racing games are actually a pretty diverse bunch, and each somehow finds a way to iterate in unique ways on what is, in every conceivable way, a very simple formula.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is one such game, and while its core remains fundamentally the same as every game of this type, there is enough in it to draw you in and keep you there for a very long time.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer, as the name itself indicates, is set in the Star Wars universe’s galaxy far, far away, across numerous original planets and featuring a bunch of new characters, all of which seem to be canon to the broader SW cosmology. You play as Shade, a custom character hailing from the planet of Gathleon, who was a slave to the Bool family – a powerful feudal house that took great advantage from the Empire to enrich itself on the backs of others.
Your character meets Kestar Bool, a legendary racer and nepobaby, and you must climb the ranks to defeat him. Things go awry and you end up having to qualify, then win the league, then win it again, and so on, and so forth. There isn’t too much to say about the story, really. It’s definitely there for the campaign mode and, actually, it’s surprisingly solid considering how small of a role it plays in the grand scheme of things.
The characters are all unique, there’s a bunch of recognizable environments and races (like the planet Crait) but overall everything is mostly original to the game itself. And it does play heavily into the broader Star Wars narrative, what with the fall of the Empire, the Rebellion’s victory, and how all of that affected each of the cast members. The story did take a few twists and turns that I did not expect and wound up providing me with quite a bit of satisfaction on that end. But, again, it’s not really the most important thing in the world here, nor the best, if we’re being honest.
The characters you meet are interesting enough to warrant your interest in the Scenarios game mode, which is where you get to experience some stories of each of the racers you meet on the track to earn a bunch of actually pretty valuable rewards.
What the overall narrative structure of the game reminded me of was the good ol’ Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and I’ve got to say I did love how you form rivalries with other contestants and how you have this ultimate “big bad” that you need to race and beat, much like you would progress through NFSMW‘s Blacklist and beat Razor who, well, set you up for failure at the game’s start.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/star-wars-galactic-racer-review/
