Star Wars: Galactic Racer studio lead Matt Webster says the new roguelite racer is way more complex than other racers by the same team.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is out now, and finally brings the series back to racing after a 24 year gap since the PS2’s Racer Revenge. And perhaps more crucially, it’s developed by the team at Fuse Games, which was born from multiple members of Criterion Games, making Galactic Racer as much of a homage to Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer as it is to Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge.
And while working with a well known and mostly family-friendly IP like Star Wars could’ve led the devs to perhaps tone things down a little, Galactic Racer is pretty tough. You’re moving at super high speeds and even brushing a wall can cause your speeder to blow up. And in the game’s campaign, you only have three chances to blow up before you’re eliminated and need to restart a run.
Talking to GamesRadar+ guides editor Will Sawyer – who also wrote our Star Wars: Galactic Racer review – Fuse Games CEO Webster spoke about the complexity of the racer, saying, “One of the things that’s really interesting for me is that modern gamers can manage a greater amount of cognitive load.”
He explains, “We are asking way more out of players in this game than I think we’ve ever done in a racing game with multiple boost things, pressing more than one face button at a time, switching up the abilities, and thinking strategically and tactically at the same time whilst traveling at 700 kilometers an hour and your eyes are on stalks. It’s quite amazing.”
Naturally, Galactic Racer has gone down a treat with many, becoming one of the highest-rated Star Wars games ever, and that’s undoubtedly down to the racing pedigree of Fuse Games… and Ben Quadinaros, obviously.