Running Is Racing

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is in many ways a great game. It's a terrific Star Wars experience, diving into the goofier part of the universe and turning it into a delightful playground. It's a blast to play, swooping around corners, ramming into opponents, or piling on the afterburners for a late-race pass. There's also a clever run-based structure, turning it into a racing roguelike of sorts. 

I'm just not actually certain it's a good racing game.

The joy of racing games tends to come from some mixture of racing against your opponents, or racing against the track. In the former, which tends to be more of an arcade-style racer, you're following your opponents, figuring out ways to force them to crash, bump them out of the way, or just finish ahead of them. In a Mario Kart circuit, you may come to hate Luigi because he's hit you with a red shell at a key point, or because he's the car in front of you in the championship and you need to finish ahead of him in order to get first place. These kinds of racing games are about the relationships with the other cars on the track around you, built by the racing itself. 

Racing the track, as happens in more technical racing games like Gran Turismo, involves learning the intricacies of each turn, where the apex is, where to start braking, if you can pass in a corner. In the more simulationist installments, you'll spend time tinkering with your setup, adjusting your tires or wings to get less pull in Turn 5 or speed down the straightaways. These kinds of games are about preparation and ability to perform.

Neither of these are the main form of racing in Galactic Racer. Your opponents are visible to you primarily as the lights of their engines ahead of you, buzzing around, occasionally exploding. There's no way to pick one from the other, unless they become your rival, and then their name is labeled above their speeder.

Likewise Galactic Racer seems wholly uninterested in getting you to learn its tracks by any mechanism other than crashing every time you're surprised. There are no maps of the tracks shown, no best lines while racing, and while there are a few corners worth memorizing because they're difficult and demand careful navigation, more of the ones worth memorizing are because they're simply too difficult to visually parse whether something is a tunnel or a wall, or whether you're turning left or right at any given moment – easily Galactic Racer's biggest annoyance. 

The reason that in normal play it's difficult to spend time learning the tracks is that you don't actually know which track you're going to be racing on when you pick a track. Each planet has several different track options based on slight variations to their layout, similar to Burnout 3 or Forza Horizon. You'll take the same corner in multiple different tracks, but which corner you take next is blocked off depending on the track layout. 

The titles of the tracks just show up on-screen, with no map or really any defining features since they're made of bits of other tracks. I've never figured out which map is which while playing; the only one whose name has stuck with me is the Scrap Spiral on Jakku, and only because that was the first short track I played. The entire effect here is that the racetrack itself, unlike even other high-speed hover-racing games like F-Zero or Wipeout, feels almost completely suborned in importance by your speeder's build and your reaction times.

Nor are you tuning your racer in any way. There are three different speeder types: the landspeeder, the speeder bike, and the skim speeder, which all drive differently from each other. There are also several different models for each different class of racer, and each of those has parts that can be swapped with one another…but these are all aesthetic, no different from changing the paint on your speeder (which is done in the same menus, with the same in-game currency.) There's also podracers which show up over the course of the game, and are terrifyingly fast when they do.

You're starting with the same base car for each campaign, instead of choosing based on handling or acceleration or the like. Your driver and some of their skills can be customized beforehand – most importantly a driving style that sets up potential synergies with parts you get later, like building your afterburner or your ability to drive while Frozen or Burning. That gets built over a campaign, but isn't inherent to the car style and model. The net effect here is that choices of style feel run-based and temporary instead of anchored to the nature of the car or driver

So how are you racing if it's neither against your opponents most of the time, or against the track? There are a few different ways, but the main motivator, both in terms of the individual race and the overall structure, is survival.