SWGR

A dozen little similarities followed over those first races, buy cheap PS5 games. That crash cam, when you knock someone else off the road, still swoops backwards to catch the tumbling wreckage and then rushes forward to catch up with you as it did in Burnout 3. There may be no wheels involved, but there's still a grippy sense (if slightly diminished, as is, just slightly, the sense of weight) that pulls you to the ground and seems to hold you there, the center of gravity in the very middle of your speeding machine. Takedowns are still called Takedowns! Boost indulged at the right moment can still change everything. You are still encouraged – and I will put this delicately – to drive like a deeply mean-spirited son of a bitch. This is not a game for polite daytime racers. It wants you to grit your teeth so hard that they start to turn to dust. Because that is what it takes. All of this is a wonderful basis for a Star Wars game, it turns out, and this is where we actually get to the Galaxy Far Far Away. Burnout slots into this universe so well because the take on Star Wars that Fuse is pursuing is the junky/formidable technology side, the side where things rattle and hiss and smell faintly of burnt wiring. Forget Jedis and wookies and midiclorians, a word I am only slightly surprised to discover that Google cannot autocorrect, so knock yourself out. Forget all that stuff. This is the Star Wars of the Millennium Falcon, which needs to be thumped just so before its engines start, and which is a thing of switches and buttons and which shudders dangerously when it drops out of hyperspace. It's the Star Wars of landcraft that's fast as heck but rusty and looks like the back panel of a refrigerator. It's the Star Wars of malfunctioning droids that shower sparks and squeal and are always ready to throw off loose parts. And you can almost feel the grit of it under your fingernails.

Boost or Risk Death

Now, is it about buying cheap games to boost your collection—or to boost in a way that might kill you? And it's all channeled through the experience of driving these wonderfully clanky metal beasts around at high speeds. Two boosts suggests a layer of strategy to the racing, and it's here we probably need to get at the game's main conceit. I've delayed it a little, but in truth, I spent a pleasant hour enjoying this return to Burnout-land without noticing it myself. Anyway: Galactic Racer's campaign is a Roguelite. And even this is all about the tech. You pick between one of three craft types, from dependable Landspeeders to darting, bad-at-corners, Speederbikes and Skim Speeders, the royalty of the race track that can turn on their sides for extra manoeuvrability but also come with a bit of a learning curve. Pick one of these guys and then you're off into a series of races split across a series of acts but also a series of planets. You make decisions on what event to select next via one of those FTL-style branching path maps that are everywhere these days. Because that's just how games are structured now.

Gameplay Variety and Replayability

Into this structure, the game pours an awful lot of stuff, more than enough to make each run feel unique. You're racing against a set cast of other racers, but your relationships with them may change from one playthrough to the next depending on whether you make deals with them, swap parts with them or develop rivalries. But more importantly there's the stuff you do to your craft. Each race leaves you with cash to buy new parts, as well as core upgrades to your machine's basic stats, and perhaps even new abilities that work a little like the kinds of things you might get in Mario Kart. Maybe you want mines to drop on the field. Maybe you want a burst of auto pilot. Maybe you want to do something nasty to others when you crash. Simple as that.

Conclusion

The best way to talk about the interaction of all of this stuff – parts and abilities and upgrades – is to tell you that in my last run, I put all my points into two stats: one measuring how robust my craft was when it came to running into walls, and another that measured how much Afterburner I had. I ignored everything else – my Ramjet, my cornering abilities, all that crucial jazz. And I did this because I was picking parts that extended my Afterburner and also extended how fast it recharged. And then I doubled down on abilities that granted me autopilot. By the time I had reached the final races, I was almost always boosting, and I was simultaneously almost never doing any actual steering. I had hacked together a deeply unwise build and I was utterly committed to it. Add to all this Racer Styles that foreground different approaches and Favours, which act as selectable load-outs of perks, and you have a Roguelite with a surprising range of variables. Don't take what I've just said above and mark this down as the game where you can just rely on autopilot, by the bye. You can play through the game for hours without touching autopilot.