There was a time when blisteringly fast arcade racing games were more commonplace. And while Nintendo has dutifully made dump trucks full of money with Mario Kart, few games outside of the indie sphere ever match the speed and violence of the games I grew up on: games like Burnout, Wipeout, Star Wars Pod Racer and in particular F-Zero GX, a masterpiece of speed that I wish Nintendo and RGG Studio would make a follow up to.
But for the most part there’s been a giant hole in my heart that few recent racing games have satisfied. I don’t just want the grounded naturalism of racing, although those games have their place. I want speed that doesn’t exist while the vehicle makes physical contact with the ground. In the case of Wipeout and F-Zero, I want a soundtrack that’s goes hard as fuck. I want impossible geometry and devious weaponry and for my enemies to erupt in a Ballardian cascade of twisting metal and fire that car companies are rarely OK with in licensed games. My ideal racing experience is unreal, anime-levels of speed and violence. I want a race as intense as Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s The Running Man short from Neo Tokyo where the racer is barely recognizable as a person any more. I want to transcend into a zone of pure speed like in Redline. I want to actually become a car like in Adolescence of Utena.
Star Wars: Galactic Racerachieves that sensation of pure speed, alien velocity, and a zone that transcends the limits of a car. As a baseline, the game is a joy to inhabit in part because there is a ton of good writing talent on this game (Chris Remo, Xalavier Nelson, Duncan Fyfe). Surprising amounts of complexity and humor have been written into a game from characters that you simply would not expect it from. “Damn, they really gave Sebulba a lot of depth” was not a statement I ever expected to say without irony. There’s many different tones that Star Wars can take, but goofy and fun have become increasingly rare in the franchise as of late. Galactic Raceras a game is brimming with weird-ass little guys like Biddy Blas, some manner of space crocodile that is voiced by wrestling heel Charles Crowley, who says bullshit Huttese nonsense like “Scrib doon!” with incredible conviction.
All of that is a rock solid foundation, but what Galactic Racer gets right, the thing I really missed, is that feeling of white knuckling down an extremely narrow trench in a hovercraft held together with duct tape and gum at inhuman speeds and knowing that there is a 50 percent chance that my ride is going to turn into a roadside IED if I don’t take the curve right. None of this is surprising, as developer Fuse Games was founded by former Criterion developers who worked on the Need for Speed and Burnout franchises. Not only is the terrain in Galactic Racer actively perilous in a way that no real race track ever will be, but the planets take place in increasingly convoluted biomes where the player must contend with heat, cold, and giant lakes of acid. Other racers are actively trying to kill you and vice versa, slamming you into the walls of crystalline rhodochrosite caves. On Earth such behavior would be considered quote unquote rude.
The actual vehicle you are driving is also your enemy. You have two boosters in the game, your safe one and your Remjets. The Remjets are the real deal, but using them becomes increasingly perilous the longer you redline them, and if you do that for too long while the warning siren screams at you they’ll just explode. Oftentimes you’ll have to deal with malfunctions on the fly or risk giving your speeder a persistent flaw that will laFst several races until it’s fixed by a charming two-headed alien vendor. The sheer amount of persistent danger that permeates the basic aspects of racing makes every turn that much more thrilling. There’s actually a racing style in the game called Firebug that sets your engines on fire if you boost for a certain amount of time, which turns out to be surprisingly practical on planets made of ice, and so I’ve been using it almost exclusively since I got it.
The angle of “these vehicles are made of cobbled-together garbage that blows up all the time” in Star Wars: Galactic Racer is accentuated by the fact that the campaign is a roguelike and your builds do not persist between tours. It is generally implied in the game that you are riding these things into the ground until the whole thing collapses and the engines die a horrible death. These are nasty, borderline illegal machines that are going to kill you eventually, a grimy fleeting feeling that you simply don’t get enough of in most racing games. This structure and attitude the game takes reminds me of a specific genre of Finnish amateur rally car racing known as Folk Racing. What distinguishes Folk Racing–aside from the fact that the cars are goofy, cobbled-together clown cars–is that anybody can put a bid on any car for a fixed, affordable price. This simple rule self-limits the amount of money anybody puts into their car and thus makes both the tuning and racing far more interesting, playful and democratic. When there is no economic incentive to buy your way to victory, you have to win on your own terms.
Galactic Racer’s limited scope and ephemeral, mandala-like attitude towards the vehicles themselves keeps the game interesting by removing the embarrassing worship of car collection that poisons so many racing games, as well as car culture generally. Galactic Raceris not a game about finding a pristine 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS in a barn like Jay Leno buried pirate treasure just outside of the most rancid music festival anybody has ever attended. The heart of Galactic Raceris your Scouse-coded, four-armed alien ape mechanic doing significant levels of fraud so she can weld together a death machine that’s about to turn the wife of rival podracer Temu Pringles into a fucking widow. Galactic Racer is a game about racing as tinkering with both the vehicle and the self, whose primary antagonist is a rich boy whose daddy can buy him anything including the league itself, a posho prick who has never had to work an honest day in his life. It is an entire game about telling that guy to go fuck himself, to do so at a significant disadvantage. It’s about wanting it more. At one point in the game, the racer Sebulba points to a massive collection of junk podracing parts and loudly proclaims, “Here is your soul! Building something from the ground up to make it faster and stronger…that’s the real soul of racing!”
