The podracing scene in The Phantom Menace is one of my favorite movie sequences ever. It's just so dang cool: The futuristic racers tear over treacherous Tatooine terrain while various Star Wars aliens bark at each other in incomprehensible sci-fi languages. Eventually a young Anakin Skywalker proves his mettle by clawing his way from the back of the pack to win the race, which left an impression on me when I first saw it at 10 years old. I always wished I could pilot a podracer myself. Over the past several days, I've been able to live out that dream thanks to Star Wars: Galactic Racer, which takes everything from that brilliant scene and packs it into a thrilling video game.
In Galactic Racer's campaign, you play as Shade, a cargo pilot who gets a shot at racing in the underground Galactic League circuit to eventually challenge the smarmy champion Kestar Bool. The game is basically a roguelike. You start a run (called a “tourâ€) by picking between a few different vehicles — though you don't get to drive a podracer until partway through the campaign — and selecting various perks that can influence your style of play. Races themselves take place across a few planets, including the desert Jakku planet from The Force Awakens, and you'll pick different events to participate in from a branching map screen. After each race, you'll get rewards to help craft your build, and along the way, you'll also play brief sections where you walk around as Shade, talk with other characters, and upgrade your vehicle.
It's all standard roguelike stuff, but the familiar format lets me better focus on the races themselves, which are really intense. Turns and obstacles that look far away come up in the blink of an eye, forcing you to react in an instant. Two different kinds of boosts mean you're constantly surging forward in some way. And all the while, other racers are on the hunt, often ramming your craft or targeting you with weapons. I nearly always felt like I was just on the cusp of losing control, and a split-second mistake usually results in a crash. (When you crash, the whole game also briefly stops to showcase your wreckage flying across the track, which is satisfying in its own way.) Things get even more intense when you finally get into an actual podracer.
It's extreme in the way that I imagined racing a vehicle in the Star Wars universe would actually be. There's more to that feeling than the races themselves, though as developer Fuse Games — a relatively new studio with former staffers of Need for Speed, Burnout, and Star Wars Battlefront maker Criterion Games — makes the whole experience feel authentically Star Wars. The speeders and vehicles are grungy and worn, and your fellow racers constantly bicker at each other. (You'll hear a lot of Huttese.) There are wipe transitions between scenes and bombastic, John Williams-esque music. My favorite touch might be the brief scene before each race where you press different buttons to prepare your vehicle, like what the racers do in The Phantom Menace.
That intensity also means that the campaign can be frustrating. I crashed a lot, often because I couldn't see an obstacle in front of me until far too late, and the opposing racers can be extremely aggressive. I sometimes wished I actually had the reflexes of a Jedi to be able to keep up. A run can take a long time — late in the game, they can exceed two hours — which makes a late loss exasperating. Between tours, you can permanently boost your vehicle's stats to make the next run easier, though that wasn't always enough to make the pain of a loss worth it. Occasionally, I turned down the difficulty so that I could play without as much pressure.
Even after a brutal tour, though, I kept finding myself thinking about when I could carve out the time for another run. Galactic Racer isn't the first Star Wars racing title, but it feels like the best realization yet of a game that embodies what made The Phantom Menace's racing scene so memorable. I know I'll never actually get to pilot a podracer, but Galactic Racer is close enough for me to live out my childhood dream.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches on October 6th on PC, PS5, and Xbox.
