There is a funny thing that happens whenever a new Star Wars game gets announced: everyone immediately wants to know where the lightsabers are. Is it another Jedi game? Can I use the Force? Is Darth Vader going to show up? Look, I love a good lightsaber as much as the next Star Wars fan, but the galaxy is absolutely enormous, and there are only so many times we need to watch another person discover that swinging a glowing sword at things is really cool. Star Wars: Galactic Racer is refreshing because it looks at that enormous galaxy and says, “What if we just… raced around in it?”, instead.
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The game focuses on the Galactic League, an unsanctioned racing circuit in the Outer Rim, with players taking on different Star Wars craft and competing across planets including Tatooine and Jakku. It even takes the racing formula in some unexpected directions with a rogue-like structure and a full story built around its racers. More importantly, it proves that a Star Wars game doesn’t need to revolve around the Force to feel unmistakably like Star Wars.
Star Wars Has Always Been Bigger Than Jedi and Lightsabers
The Star Wars universe has always been bigger than the Jedi, even if the games don’t always act like it. Some of the franchise’s most interesting stories have nothing to do with the Force at all. Star Wars becomes particularly compelling when it shows us what ordinary people are doing while the galaxy’s biggest heroes are busy saving it. There is an entire universe happening outside the main conflict, and games have barely scratched the surface of it decades later.
Now, the idea of racing in a Star Wars game has existed quite some time, but it has usually been treated as a fun diversion rather than something worthy of being the centerpiece of an entire game. The Phantom Menace gave us podracing, but Galactic Racer takes that basic idea and asks what an entire racing culture might look like when the Jedi aren’t around to steal the spotlight with their fancy glowing sticks. The answer clearly is that the Outer Rim feels like a place with its own identity instead of just another backdrop for the latest galactic super crisis.
More importantly, this proves how flexible Star Wars actually is. The franchise doesn’t need the Force to create conflict, and it doesn’t need a lightsaber to create excitement. A good story can come from almost anywhere in the galaxy if developers are willing to look beyond the parts of Star Wars that are easiest to recognize and everyone already knows too much about. Freedom is one of the franchise’s greatest strengths, and Galactic Racer is a good reminder that there is still an enormous amount of Star Wars left to discover.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer Shows Why the Franchise Needs to Take More Risks
What makes Galactic Racer particularly encouraging is that it isn’t simply a traditional racing game wearing a Star Wars costume. Its runs-based structure gives races a sense of progression, while the choices players make between events can change how their run develops. There’s also a distinct sense of danger that can’t just be washed away with a simple reset. The game has a stronger identity than usual titles in the genre as simply winning one race and immediately moving onto the next isn’t the whole story. It feels like the developers actually asked what a Star Wars racing career could look like instead of stopping at the obvious answer most racing games tend to.
The game also understands that it doesn’t need a famous Star Wars character to make its story important, a big deal for the writing. Its conflict comes from the racers themselves, which allows the game to build its own rivalries rather than borrowing emotional weight from characters audiences already know. Really, it’s a bold choice for a franchise that has spent decades convincing us that every important event in the galaxy needs to somehow connect to the Skywalker family. Galactic Racer gets to create its own little corner of the universe, and that makes the galaxy feel bigger rather than smaller.
Ultimately, I want to see more games take this approach. There is nothing wrong with another great Jedi game, and no doubt another is coming our way fairly soon. But, Star Wars becomes much more interesting when developers stop treating the Jedi as the franchise’s only reliable source of adventure. Galactic Racer takes something that has always existed in the background and gives it enough room to become its own story. If more developers were willing to do that, Star Wars could start feeling more like the enormous galaxy it has always promised to be.
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Courtesy of Ubisoft
