SWGR

The story and characters are also excellent, and if you're looking to buy cheap PS5 games, this is one title worth checking out. I wasn't expecting to care about any of the characters, but by the end, I was invested in many of them. I was certainly determined to take out Kestar Bool and found the arc of that main narrative very satisfying. But maybe the thing that pushed me over the edge from loving Galactic Racer to considering it one of the best entries in the genre is the multiplayer. First, you have a robust Arcade mode that is a series of challenges where you can set times on a leaderboard. I love that stuff. Because it gives you a reason to keep coming back. The head-to-head online racing is where the game really shines, though. You can choose quick races or a multiplayer tour, and the multiplayer tour puts 12 racers through a 5-planet series that ends in a championship grand prix, and throughout this tour you will upgrade your speeder exactly as you do in the campaign, and by playing against the same people for a series of races, you get a lot of opportunities for drama. The game asks you to pick a rival and to bet on where you will finish, and that means people have incentives to take you out. So it was common to see two or three pilots ramming each other and exploding around every turn – or for your main rival to jump over your head and try to take you out by cutting you off from above. And you feel that rivalry in your gut. It is the choices we make. It is the choices that define us.

Impressions

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is everything I hoped it would be buy cheap games and see for yourself. Fuse built a campaign that keeps giving me reasons to master the tracks, then made the racing feel good enough that I wanted to. And for my fellow Episode I Racer lovers: Galactic Racer's marketing has kept the podracers in the background, but don't let that fool you. By the time I was done with the campaign, I found myself happy and whispering one thing to myself: Now this is podracing. Or at least, that's what it felt like. A few years back I got to ask Alex Ward, co-founder of Criterion, about the driving model in Burnout. A friend told me there was real physics under all that arcade noise. Physics of strange nuance and beauty. I was reverent asking him, even if I sounded a bit lost – is it a driving model or a handling model or a physics model? – and Ward, bless him, was having none of it. He said in the very early Burnout games the cars didn't even have wheels. How's that for nuance.

SWRG

Star Wars: Galactic Racer then, with its landspeeders and podracers, all of them ghosting over the dirt on some blurry antigrav cushion, feels like coming home. Ward may not be involved, but Fuse Games, the developer, has an awful lot of Criterion DNA coiled up inside it, and you can feel it in your hands, in the way the vehicles lean and drift. If you're like me, and you've come to accept over the years that Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise are together the most thrilling video games ever made, that's a good thing. But even if you know nothing about Burnout, you're going to have a very pleasant time here.

Burnout vs Star Wars Galactic Racer

I'm starting with Burnout rather than Star Wars because I feel like Galactic Racer does that too. Sure there's some lovely faux-Williams music to kick us off, twinkly and intriguing out in space, martial and brooding down on the planets, and we're wedged somewhere in the timeline between Episode 6 and Episode 7. There are droids and desert planets and fish-headed aliens. But the game came alive for me in my first race, on my first corner, when I realised that if I was playing Burnout I would press a particular face button right about now to ignite boost for the first time. Purely running on muscle memory I pushed the button while the thought was occurring to me. And I got the same boost. The same feeling. I was jolted back in my chair. Speed, yes, but the horizon seemed to broaden and shimmer. I was home.