STAR WARS: Galactic Racer

Allow us to set the scene. Three corners from the finish line, another racer shunts your repulsorcraft into an adjacent boulder, sending you careening into the toxic wastes of Sentinel I. You try to correct your course. Too late. The vehicle that took you 4 tours and 23 races to tune is now scattered across the track, your League Token is forfeit, and the tour is over.

These are the moments that are instrumental in your journey to become Champion of the Galactic League, and the moments that the team built around STAR WARS: Galactic Racer — available today for XBOX Series X|S.

“We’ve got a history of trying to make failure fun,” says Creative Director at Fuse Games Kieran Crimmins. “Failure can be this big, spectacular, exciting, interesting and rewarding experience in the game. Our wreck-out system is meant to be the ethos of how Fuse approach game making. Crashing isn’t just a big spectacle; it has consequence as well as mechanical rewards so you can learn something for your next run.”

“Failure is fuel, which is where our runs-based mechanic comes into play,” adds Co-founder and Head of Content at Fuse Games Steve Uphill. “It’s the opportunity to try again, and when you get the right combination of builds, parts and upgrades, failure makes winning feel hard earned, but so much more rewarding and creates a powerful and unique player story.”

*Kieran Crimmins (left) and Steve Uphill (right).*

In STAR WARS: Galactic Racer, player persistence is the key to success. Kieran explains what runs-based actually means, and how Fuse Games adds their own spin on the widely used term: “For us, runs-based is a replayable loop that allows you to experiment with a new way to play every time, see how far you get with it, and if you fail, you still get some great rewards to go again so you can try with a new combination of parts and abilities.”

“From start to end, the process looks like this: the player starts by choosing which vehicle you want to attempt that run in, whether it be a skim speeder, speeder bike, or landspeeder. They all have slightly different playstyles and attributes. Then, you pick a Racer Style, which gives your build a baseline direction. So, if you wanted to make an afterburner build or a cooled build for example, you start with that Racer Style, then select which abilities, parts and upgrades complement it at the end of each race.

Depending how well you do in the races, you’ll also get financial rewards that you can spend at the shop in between planets. There’s always going to be the temptation to try out new abilities or upgrades, but these are rewarded randomly, so there’s an element of luck involved. Most will be able to synergise with your build in some way, so it’s up to your knowledge and creativity for that limited set to find a path to success. If you’re lucky, you’ll win the league. If you don’t win the league, however, the path to success is filled with challenges, rivals, and events to test you. Crash too many times and you’ll ‘wreck out’, or you fail a high-stakes event, then you’ll lose a League Token and be back to the start.”

Failure is an important part of the game’s mechanics, which is why ‘wrecking out’ is so instrumental to gameplay: “You have a certain number of crashes that you’re allowed to do in any race,” says Kieran, “not all events have it, but a lot of them do. If you use all your crashes, then you’ll ‘wreck out’ and have to start from the beginning of that tour. Crucially, we wanted there to be an element of consequence in the gameplay. Your decisions matter across every part of the game, so you need some sort of finite failure state for your decisions to matter, and wrecking out felt like a great manifestation of that. Every corner matters, every interaction with another racer matters. It forces you to think about what choices you make and what you’re doing, rather than driving with abandon.”

It’s this element of player agency and choice that makes the runs-based loop in STAR WARS: Galactic Racer so satisfying. Kieran expresses the importance of player choice: “If you think about playing in its most base form, it isn’t someone tells you what to do then you do it. That’s a job, that’s instruction. Instead, we provide a play space full of fun things. Play is the choice to arrange them in the way that you want, and creating your own moments and journeys. The power of a good player story is the absolute power of play in general.”

And that agency doesn’t end when the run does. Kieran continues: “There are two important progression routes for a run. The first is your stat build-up, where you get temporary stats for each vehicle like cornering, resilience, ramjet, afterburner etc. This allows you to dial into your playstyle as well as your build, and you can add points to make those base stats different. The second one is your combination of parts. As standard, you’ll get to install up to five parts. Each of those parts have different rarity, and you build those up as you go through the different events, either from the shop or as event awards. They all do vastly different things and synergise in different ways, some even develop faults that change builds even further. The combinations in the parts system is so vast, I’m not even sure we’ve seen every single combination yet!”

“You also get permanent progression outside of each tour that you can put into one of your vehicle types. So, it’s the same set of stats, but they’ll stay there for the rest of your enjoyment of the game. Once you beat a tour, you open up a larger pool of parts. You’ll also unlock new ‘favors’ that you can equip to further modify the rules for the next run. Another form of permanent progression is the ability to upgrade your Racer Styles, so you can unlock all sorts of different ways to play.”

These features carry over to multiplayer, too: “In multiplayer, we wanted to create a runs-based system that worked. They’re not exactly the same, because it’s a shorter session time, and we wanted people to move through it much faster. Similarly to campaign, you pick a Racer Style, upgrade your vehicle with parts, upgrades and abilities, but you gamble it all on the final knockout event in the multiplayer tour. Winning the multiplayer tour nets you vast amounts of XP so you can unlock new characters and customization. And, even if it hasn’t been your best run, you can still gain XP by voting on the player you think is going to win so you can still have an engaging final race. Because there is an element of luck and skill involved, we wanted to reward racers for playing, even if sometimes getting shunted into a wall could mean the end.”

The element of crashing and consequence in campaign and multiplayer is also what makes it dramatic to watch. Steve spends his time on the moment of impact itself, making sure each crash the player caused reads as such. “Having such a breadth of player choice and decisions meant that they’ll see crashes a lot. That’s why it was so important to us to not simply use pre-canned animations for the crashes. We wanted to generate a system that made every shot feel cinematic but was also procedural, so every time a crash happens you see it differently.

We’ve got four different vehicle types, and each one behaves completely differently. The speeder bike is smaller than the other vehicles, so it rolls, the podracers have separate engine units to the cockpit, which has its own logic. We needed a crash system that worked across all of them, and made sure every crash told a story instead of just blowing up. The speeder bike hitting a tree on Endor is iconic to “STAR WARS: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi,” so that stays an instant hit. Bigger vehicles roll and come apart over time, extending the spectacle and creating impact. And even then, if the same crash repeats, it loses the impact and emotion we want the players to feel. Timing was the real constraint throughout, show the impact and spectacle but keep the racing flow.”

“Podracing crash sequences in “STAR WARS: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” can be up to thirty seconds long. We’ve designed our maximum to be up to eight seconds. That’s the real challenge!” Steve laughs. “If I had it my way, they would be much longer. But the team was right. Longer cinematics slowed gameplay down too much. But that was a creative constraint: How do you build the vehicles and the camera system to make the most of eight seconds, cinematically and procedurally, when you don’t have long to play with?”

Vehicles were one half of that problem. The camera was the other, because a crash that isn’t framed right loses spectacle and instead, becomes noise: “The camera system might seem simple, but they’re incredibly hard. A crash is instantaneous and the system has to work out where the vehicle is, where it’s heading, how fast, what’s blocking the shot, all before it can even decide how to frame it. The whole sequence has to feel believable and weighted, or it falls apart.”

“If the weight feeling’s gone, the vehicles just feel like toys, like something that’s made of wood or plastic bouncing down the track. And we’ve got four vehicle types, all a different size and mass, so getting that sense of weight across all of them is genuinely hard. Sometimes they didn’t land… they bounced.”

“The answer ended up being a mixture of iteration,” Steve continues, “as well as creating a system that allows the camera to intelligently read the environment. At the moment of the crash, we introduce some unique geometry to the scene that ensures the camera is always placed in the optimal position, whilst also triggering the right VFX, audio and various other elements to make the crashes immersive and satisfying to watch.”

“It’s kind of a modern marvel when you think about it,” adds Kieran. “If you were to film that for a movie sequence, you’re talking three to six months of planning and a day of shooting to get one fixed camera where you knew everything that was about to happen. This does it in milliseconds.”

Put the systems and the spectacle side by side, and you get something that’s easy to describe but hard work to build: a crash that feels earned and unique, not scripted.

This takes us back to that moment on the track, three corners from the finish. 23 runs of tuning, gone in half a second and exactly the kind of moment the team spent years making sure would land.

That’s the whole idea: the systems that give the crash meaning, the craft that gives it weight. Put those together and a racing game stops being about who crosses the line first, and instead about everything you’re willing to risk to get there.

STAR WARS: Galactic Racer is available now for XBOX Series X|S and is available for purchase on the XBOX Store.

STAR WARS: Galactic Racer Deluxe Edition

Secret Mode

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$79.99

Get it now

Pre-Order now to get the following digital content:
• Exclusive Pre-Order Bonus Livery for your repulsorcraft
• Exclusive Pre-Order Bonus Player Banner for multiplayer modes
Note: Pre-Order Bonus content may be made available for purchase at a later date.

The STAR WARS: Galactic Racer Deluxe Edition contains three exclusive vehicles, a unique Livery, three Arcade Events, a deluxe Player Banner, and a Digital Art Book.
• Three exclusive vehicles: Become the envy of the paddock and pilot the Kor Sarun: Ciza T speeder bike, the Kor Sarun: Darc X landspeeder, and the Kor Sarun: Rak S skim speeder
• Unique Livery for pilots who need to race in style. Coat any of your speeders with an exclusive Livery inspired by the Naboo N-1 starfighter
• Three Arcade Events for the fearless racers. The Galactic League challenges you to three exclusive Arcade trials designed specifically for your Kor Sarun repulsorcraft
• Deluxe Player Banner containing an exclusive Insignia and Background for multiplayer modes
• Digital Art Book showcasing never-before-seen character, vehicle, and location artwork from the development of STAR WARS: Galactic Racer*

STAR WARS: Galactic Racer is a runs-based, high-stakes reinvention of racing born in the lawless Outer Rim of the STAR WARS galaxy.

The Empire’s grip on the galaxy has finally broken, and with its fall comes a new obsession: speed. As the New Republic struggles to rebuild, gambling, entertainment, and glory fuel a booming underground.

Out of this chaos, the Galactic League is born: an unsanctioned racing circuit where syndicates sponsor pilots, fortunes are won and lost in seconds, and only the bold survive.

No Force. No prophecy. Just skill, strategy, and the will to rise.

COMPETE IN HIGH-STAKES RACES
Slam, shunt, and takedown rivals across varied circuits as you pilot landspeeders, speeder bikes, skim speeders, and podracers. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

SURVIVE A DANGEROUS UNDERGROUND SPORT
Join The Galactic League – an unsanctioned racing circuit born in the lawless Outer Rim. Become Shade, a lone racer chasing revenge and glory.

BUILD AND CUSTOMIZE YOUR CRAFT
Pilot different classes of repulsorcraft each with distinct physics and playstyles. Build a ride that showcases your style and gives you a competitive edge.

BATTLE RIVALS IN MULTIPLE GAME MODES
Ride solo through a story-driven campaign of shifting alliances or brave strategic PvP grudge matches where reputation rides with you.

CLIMB THE RANKS AND EARN REWARDS
Prove yourself through intense rivalries and escalating challenges. Every choice shapes your prospects as you build your status in The Galactic League.

*Internet Connection required. Digital Art Book available for viewing and for download from starwarsgalacticracer.com/digital_art using the in-game redemption code.

The STAR WARS: Galactic Racer Deluxe Upgrade add-on must be installed to access the Digital Art Book redemption code.