Hands-on: Star Wars: Galactic Racer’s online multiplayer is chaotic but rewarding

After completing each race, higher credits and rarer vehicle parts are rewarded depending on your finishing position. Standard vehicle upgrades are rewarded in each race, but winning a bet earns better part upgrades throughout the Tour, from improving your vehicle’s cornering ability and strength to modifying the Ramjet boost. 

Fuse Games describes the first five rounds of each Tour as a “build chase,” with the aim of building the best vehicle possible for the final deciding round. Essentially, the Multiplayer Tour plays like a condensed slice of the single-player campaign designed for shorter sessions.

“The runs-based campaign mode has this upgrade loop where you slowly upgrade your vehicle over time across a lot more races,” Creative Director Kieran Crimmins explained. “What we wanted to do with the Multiplayer Tour is compress that into a half-hour or 40-minute play session.

“You still get that escalation of builds and speeds throughout all the different planets. But we make it happen a lot faster. We see an accelerative upgrade path in a way I’ve never seen in a racing game multiplayer before. It feels unique. Every time you play it, it’s going to be a different experience, a different build and a different way to win.”

This approach to multiplayer progression “solves the problem of keeping online players in an event for longer, regardless of your finishing position,” adds Fuse Games CEO Matt Webster.

“You want to stick with it because you feel like you can get something out of it,” he said. “That one more go feeling persists versus what we used to see, which is if you feel like you’ve had a sucky first race, you bail out.”

To be clear, vehicle upgrade perks are identical in the single-player campaign and Multiplayer Tour but have separate progression paths. Custom liveries and cosmetic parts unlocked in the single-player campaign can be transferred to multiplayer, however.

“The idea is that the single-player campaign gives you a chance to learn the kind of builds you can make,” Crummins explained, making it easier to choose your favourites when trying to get the edge over competitors in the multiplayer.   

“Your build is transient in multiplayer,” Webster added. “It’s not like you’ve got a car in your garage and you reel it out. It’s a ‘what am I going to make in this [session],’ which I think is really fun.”

“Anything can happen in the final race”

After the initial five rounds, you can then bet on the winner to reap XP rewards in the final showdown. This unlocks cosmetic vehicle liveries, banners and backgrounds, as well as new characters with different racing styles and pre-equipped perks to suit your playstyle.

Some characters, for example, focus on speed by starting with more powerful and longer-lasting Afterburners, earning a 10% refill for every overtake. Others prioritise defensive abilities, with stronger vehicles less vulnerable to attacks and pre-equipped with shields.  

“Anything can happen in the final race,” said Crummins. “You’ve always got the opportunity to make a comeback.”

With up to 12 players fighting for position on hazard-tracks, multiplayer races are fast and frenetic, with the betting system adding stakes to each match.

At times, they can perhaps get too chaotic, however: most races had more crashes and pileups than a typical NASCAR Daytona 500 race.

Watching your vehicle get frequently smashed to pieces after an online opponent nudges you into a wall is sometimes frustrating, but the build system motivates you to create a more competitive vehicle. This will likely be less of an issue for players who spend time honing their skills and in the campaign.

Despite their challenging nature, the matchmaking system in online races isn’t skill-based, as Fuse Games explained the goal is to “get you into the game as quickly as possible.”

Switching from the standard Landspeeders, Speeder Bikes or Skim Speeders to podracers intensified the action thanks to their extreme speed that tests your skill and reaction times.

Unlike other events, online podraces are limited to eight players per match instead of 12 and can’t be mixed with other vehicle classes since their increased performance would undoubtedly cause balancing issues, with the final showdown taking place on Tatooine’s iconic Mos Espa circuit.

Notably, this is the first time that podracers can be raced online in a Star Wars game. For many fans, piloting podracers with other players at the iconic circuit from The Phantom Menace is a tantalising prospect.

No split-screen multiplayer

Unlike the original Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, Galactic Racer won’t support local split-screen multiplayer, however. Implementing this was a “stretch too far,” according to Webster. 

“We’ve known enough from our past what it takes to get to that [split-screen multiplayer],” he said. “Those weren’t the compromises that we wanted to make. We wanted to pour everything into the big-screen Star Wars [experience].”

Overall, Galactic Racer’s multiplayer looks like it will complement the single-player campaign with a chaotic but rewarding gameplay loop. Our main concern is that online races could sometimes be overly challenging for new players without a skill-based matchmaking system.

But like the single-player campaign, there’s a surprising amount of depth when experimenting with the various vehicle builds, and the moment-to-moment racing is exhilarating thanks to the terrific sense of speed and hazardous tracks. 

Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches on 6^th October for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. With the game in the final stages of development and the release date getting closer, it’s an exciting but daunting time for Fuse Games after working on its debut project for three and a half years.

“Finalising the game is a strange feeling,” said Webster. “You’re preconditioned to see everything [that’s] wrong. You’re seeing lots of things you feel are wrong, and you know you’re running out of time to make them right.

“So you’ve got to make your peace with a bunch of things. It’s a funny time for the developers. There are tons of emotions. There’s excitement. There’s also nervousness. It can be challenging to shift from that ‘I wish I could make it better’ into making peace with it.”