Soaring spaceships are no stranger to Star Wars video games, with thrilling dogfights at the core of both EA’s Battlefront and Star Wars: Squadrons. Yet very few George Lucas gaming adaptations have swapped aerial showdowns for laps around the intergalactic racetrack–until Galactic Racer.
Helmed by talent that worked on the vehicular sections of Battlefront and racing classics like Burnout and Need for Speed, Galactic Racer is a game purely about the thrill of zooming past the Galaxy’s greatest racers, and thanks to its roguelike structure, this tournament plays dirty.
As you soar across the dunes of Jaaku and cruise across Lantaana’s lava-filled caverns, it’s important to race prepared. Where some racers may have the backing of insidious forces, we at GameSpot like to support the underdog. So in order to make sure you secure those podium finishes–and give repulsive mining magnate Kestar Bool a run for his money–here are all the Galactic Racer tips you’ll need to finish first in a galaxy far, far away.
Cool your jets; learn to master your Afterburner and fear your Ramjet
Armed with both a classic boost in the form of an Afterburner and then a souped-up thruster called a Ramjet, it’s all too easy to send your vehicle hurtling into a nearby corner. Yet it’s not just a badly judged turn that can cause your speeder to explode. Making use of the aforementioned turbo-charged Ramjet becomes a sweaty exercise in risk and reward. Push the souped-up boost to its limits and the thruster will quickly start to overheat as you lurch forward.
This phase is called redlining, and is about as sweat-inducing as boosting in a game gets. While redlining sends your ship lurching forward, redline too long, however, and your ramjet will detonate in a torrent of flames.
As you progress through each tour, you’ll unlock new abilities, parts, and vehicles that can help you extend your redline time and mitigate engine damage.
Avoid Eliminator races until you’ve leveled up your speeder
In order to keep the races as unpredictable as its story beats, each galactic tour consists of different events, with the player able to choose between different branching paths. Made up of standard races, field tests, eliminator matches, or mystery encounters, each one contains different levels of risk and–you guessed it–reward.
Eliminator matches require you to finish top three, or you’ll lose your league token and be kicked back to the start of your run. Much like Mario Kart World’s Knockout Tour, you must finish top three to advance to the next race in the tour, with players in lower positions slowly eliminated from the race, battle royale-style, as the competition unfolds.
Prioritize unlocking new vehicles
There are three main vehicle types in Galactic Racer’s campaign: Speeder, speeder bike and skim speeder. Don’t let the suspiciously similar names fool you; all offer wildly different approaches to the race track. Your default all-rounder, Speeder is the first vehicle you unlock with good reason. Sturdy and solid, its less likely to be pushed off the track by a rival racer – but it also lacks the speed of the bike.
Speeder bikes are your classic glass cannons, absurdly fast but can see you forced into a wall and exploding into scrap within the blink of an eye. The Skim speeder is the last to unlock but offers a solid balance of speed and sturdiness. Each of these can of course be upgraded, using a mix of permanent stat upgrades and run-specific buffs.
Whichever your favor, be sure to initially use your currency to buy the different vehicle types, allowing you to see which vehicle leaves your intergalactic rivals choking in your dust.
Understanding your upgrades
Finishing a tour nets you tuning points, which are used to make permanent stat upgrades to your vehicles, where credits buy you temporary buffs for the current run. The other upgrades you unlock are tour-specific; these temporary boosts fade into the proverbial Sarlaac pit once you lose the race and your galactic token.
This means that you can either choose to prioritise credits–largely spent on temporary upgrades–or tuning points, which give you a longer-term boost. If you place high enough in the race, you get to select from one of three (run-specific) stat upgrades. Will you choose to favor resilience, increasing the damage your ship can take? Or perhaps battery–increasing how often you can use your ability, which in turn improves your boost–or powering up your drift?
No matter your preferred method of madness, build crafting is key. For example, Speeders are a glass cannon, shockingly fast but painfully fragile. Yet if you choose to up the resilience and focus on your shield, you can soon mold the once-delicate bikes into a force to be reckoned with. For me, it was buffing my speeder bike that finally saw me win consistently.
It’s a deep and fairly complex mesh of upgrades and abilities that will take a while to fully parse, but the reward is an impressively customizable approach to racing.
Style over substance
As well as boosting stats for individual vehicles, you unlock distinct “racer styles”–character traits for Shade that come with different stat boosts and abilities. Every style caters to a different approach and can be leveled up over time, allowing you to experiment with combinations of builds and vehicles to find the exact setup that suits your playstyle.
No run is ever the same, with different paths, upgrades, and new build combinations drastically changing the feel of each tour. Racer styles are easy to understand from the get-go, and once you have a few of these under your belt, life gets infinitely easier.
Hitting a wall? Change up your build
Returning to a tour with a more competent vehicle, more abilities, and greater stats sees you consistently coming in first where you struggled to come fourth previously. During my first session, I failed every field test and avoided every eliminator match like the plague, with each eliminator match I was forced to take resulting in failure. Despite spending hours upgrading my land speeder, I simply wasn’t progressing. It was time to roll the dice and go all out speed. The results spoke for themselves.
Pay attention to planet-specific debuffs
Ando Prime is a snow-capped, Hoth-esque locale featuring ice-coated peaks and frozen tundra. Sentinel 1 sees you soaring across a toxic, corrosive green planet featuring pools of acid. While these could simply be set dressing, in Galactic Racer, extreme weather has massive effects on your vehicles.
Thanks to Ando Prime’s sub-zero temperatures, racing along its ice-coated peaks causes your ship to slowly freeze, meaning it’s essential to drift and weave your way through a series of heating enclaves that burn off the ice, keeping the vehicular frostbite at bay.
While the arctic conditions can thaw your ship, the cold also prevents your ramjet from overheating, allowing you to boost across Ando Prime without fear of exploding.
Lantaana’s lava can of course melt away your vehicle, and spending too much time drifting through Sentinel 1’s acid and your ship will slowly start to corrode. These debuffs become crucial things to consider when modifying your build, with temporary upgrades for your current run helping to negate the effects of corrosion, frost damage, and lava burns.
