At time of writing this, having just completed a full run of the main mode and rolling credits, I can only name three of the tracks featured in Star Wars: Galactic Racer. There's Acid Ring, memorable for its opening NASCAR-esque banking turn. There's Salt Circle, being exactly what it sounds like (and also being, as Lex Luddy said on Bluesky, Baby Park on Crait). And then there's Griffin's Flight. I know Griffin's Flight because it shows up quite often at the beginning of Act III runs, and it caused me to wreck out and end my run early many, many times. After the 5th or 6th (or 7th) crash out on this track, I asked myself, "Is there no way to practice this?"
Unless I'm an absolute fool, I believe the answer to this question is no. I looked all over the menus to find where I can just select a track from a list - for a time trial, a quick race against CPUs, a tournament mode that might include the tracks that I need to practice - and I found none. This is when it was really solidified in my mind, that this game is a rogue-like first, racing game second. While I think it makes a lot of sense to give a racing game a rogue-like structure, I fear they may have charged blindly forward down that path with no regard to what they were leaving behind.
In the interest of not beating around the bush any further, I think SWGR is a really cool and fun game with an interesting, well-executed main game mode, and a downright criminal lack of racing game standards elsewhere. When you are on the track and the clock is ticking and the engines screaming, the game feels fantastic. It's fast, it's brutal, it's chunky, it's exhilarating. There are three types of vehicles that all feel distinct, and you can tune them through repeated runs to perform even better. There is little to fault the game between the start and end of a race. But, to ship the game without an option to simply pick up and play any track I want is psychotic, and can only have happened if they had tunnel-vision on being a rogue-like over everything else - even a racing game. Racing games ARE practice. They are about learning the tracks, learning your vehicle, learning how they fit together, all through repetition. I don't play fighting games, but I imagine this would be like shipping a fighting game without a practice mode; imagine you couldn't take a quiet moment to learn your character's moves, your combos, your matchups, just fuck you, jump in and learn as you go. A very familiar ask for a rogue-like, absolutely maddening for a racing game. There are also Scenario and Arcade modes, which somewhat fill those needed areas, but I'll also explain later how they do not.
Let's now take some time to dig into those modes. The big headliner is the Campaign, the main story/rogue-like mode. Across three increasingly long and difficult acts, you'll do various racing events and slowly build up the parts, abilities, and tune-ups to make your vehicle capable of wining the big event at the end. Its a rogue-like, complete with favors given by other characters (like the boons or tarot cards of Hades II) and the exact same three-criss-crossing-paths style map that every rogue-like is content to steal from Slay the Spire. You keep going until you win or are disqualified, usually by crashing too many times in one race or not placing in an Eliminator event. When you are DQ'd, you start a new run, with new upgrades and favors, and give it another go.
Although a lot of it will likely feel very familiar to anyone with experience playing rogue-likes, it all does work fairly well. Racing is a good fit for this structure! Especially when its all contextualized by adding new parts and adjustments to your vehicle. SWGR's spiritual predecessor, Star Wars Episode I Racer was honestly half-way to being a roguelike anyway. Its campaign had you using your winnings to buy parts, and if you missed an important windfall of credits by placing badly, or if you wasted credits buying bad parts, you would have to live with those choices. Or start a new campaign. This pushes those ideals to their natural next step. Although, I will say that Episode I Racer felt much more tactile when you were upgrading your racer. You could see the parts, how different models looked, and where they would go in your ride. SWGR has no such feature, and just feels like picking powers and putting them in a ephemeral slot, like adding a word to your vocabulary (like ephemeral).
My main gripe with the Campaign mode is that the game does not tell you the name of the track you'll be racing on until you are about to start. I don't know what benefit the game gets from hiding this info from the player. I might be able to learn some of these tracks if the game told me their names before! It would also give the player another decision to make when planning their route through the events. They could use that knowledge to avoid tracks they dislike, or aim for ones they do like, which gives them another vector of decision-making. Kind of baffling that this is kept secret from the player.
The next mode, the Scenarios, has the player taking a pre-built rig and playing a short, 5 event stint with it. It's all on one planet and you can't alter the vehicle. It's a very straight-forward challenge mode. I like it, because it can show the player strengths of other racer builds that they might want to try. Also, it gives a very straight-forward quick-to-access shot of racing action (with no walking around or fiddling between), which means it's the closest thing to a standard tournament or cup mode this game has. Of course, I need to point out that this is not a standard tournament mode: you can't choose which vehicle you want for which Scenario, a tournament in other games would have a mix of different tracks in each, and for some reason the game still doesn't let the play know what tracks are coming up. I just don't get why they are so secretive with these tracks!
The next mode, Arcade, is an even more straight forward challenge mode. I haven't done all of them, but the one's I've played are basically time trials, using preset vehicles on preset tracks, sometimes with other specific conditions. You can get gold, silver, or bronze times. It would almost work really well as a classic time trial mode, where the player could practice and learn the tracks, except for two problems. One, the preset vehicles means I can't practice any track with any vehicle I want. And two, the game doesn't tell you the names of the track still! And I don't just mean in the menus, when you start an Arcade challenge, it doesn't tell you the name of the track even when you're racing on it! I could practice the Landspeeder Ace challenge 100 times and have no idea what the name of the track is! Why on God's green Earth would that be the case?! Overall the Arcade mode is fine, and mainly seems to be there for scoreboard chasers. It could be useful for practicing specific racing techniques, I guess.
The last mode is Multiplayer. Having this game on PS5 and not wanting to pay for Sony's overpriced online, I can't tell you much about it. The game won't even let me explore the options. I can see that there is a Quick Race option in there. That sounds nice, wish there was a single-player version of that. I may grab a month of PS+ cheap somewhere to try it out.
Some stray thoughts before I wrap up:
I know these are staples of rogue-likes, but there are enough status effects in this game to make a JRPG blush. I could maybe do with a few less. Although I understand these are useful as vectors for upgrades, to mitigate or even take advantage of with different builds.
A lot of the characters are memorable and either likeable or fun-to-hate. Sebulba rules as your slimy egotistical coach. A lot of this has the Disney-era sanitized sheen to it though. Make some of these people bigger bastards.
I love the pre-race start-up checks. It feels like flipping a bunch of switches and hitting buttons, selling that feeling of being behind the reigns of a sci-fi vehicle. Similarly, having two different boosts is weird, but it feels awesome to time a switch between the two perfectly and shouting, "Punch it!"
Elimination events seem much more punishing than anything else. I would always avoid them if I could because the risk was never worth the reward.
Biddy Blas is king and perfect.
Overall, I think Star Wars Galactic Racer is a great game. But, it confidently sped off in a direction that I wish it hadn't. I can still enjoy the ride (and it is a very enjoyable ride), but wish that it would turn around. Star Wars Galactic Racer is a rogue-like first and a racer second, when I know I would have preferred if it was the other way around.