Galactic Racer Immediately Taught Me A Hard Lesson, And I Have To Respect It

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is getting well-deserved plaudits for its tense high-speed arcade racing action and an inventive roguelite structure that fits the genre like Vader's black glove. I have yet to complete the single-player campaign, but before I even realized it was a roguelite, the Star Wars racing game earned my respect with a statement of intent. Namely: It let me fail almost immediately. As you may know if you've been following coverage including Jordan Ramée's excellent review, the campaign is not simply a linear sequence of races tied together with a story. Instead, it uses roguelike hooks, which means you earn permanent upgrades across runs, but mostly build your strategy as you go with the options given to you at any given time. At any point, you can crash out--sometimes literally--and fail to advance further in the story for that run. You proceed to lick your wounds, cash in for any permanent upgrades you might want, and then start again. This is an unexpectedly brilliant gameplay loop for an arcade racer, a genre which was always built around high-stakes fun and the tension that you could easily lose your progress and your quarters. But my first time through, I di…