By Star Wars: Galactic Racer is out now, and I’m pleased to say it is playable on the Steam Deck from day one. It may not be the best-looking game on Valve’s handheld, but it runs well enough to enjoy properly, and there’s a lot more to it than just racing.
More than just races
Developed by Fuse Games and published by Secret Mode, Galactic Racer is set in the lawless Outer Rim after the Empire’s fall, where an underground circuit called The Galactic League bankrolls chaotic, high-stakes races. Alongside the racing there are some great extras, including little mini games to kick off a race and sections between events where you can take some time out, get to know your surroundings, and sort out upgrades and other bits and pieces.
Settings and performance on Steam Deck
I’m running the game on the absolute minimum settings, which makes it mostly a 30fps experience on the Steam Deck. The good news is that Galactic Racer has XeSS frame generation built in, and it makes things even more fun on the Deck, pushing us up to 60 frames per second. It does need a game restart to enable, which is a little annoying if you want to toggle it on and off, but overall it performs very well.
Frame generation adds a small amount of input latency that you’ll easily get used to. However, this is a very reaction-based racer, so if you don’t want any extra latency at all, you’ll want to keep every form of frame generation switched off.
Career mode with a roguelite twist
There’s a huge career mode with lots of races, and it has a really interesting roguelite structure: crash three times and you’re out of the tournament, forcing you to start again. That means paying close attention to the routes and not trashing your racer more than three times in a race. Thankfully, you keep all your upgrades and unlocks between attempts, so you’ll get better and push further each time.
Online multiplayer
Multiplayer works perfectly fine online on the Steam Deck, and here you get unlimited crashes, so a wipeout just costs you positions. With 12 players online, it’s chaotic mayhem in the best way. The one issue I ran into was signing into my Epic account, which just went to a blank screen and never opened anything, so hopefully that gets patched in a future update.
Final thoughts
Galactic Racer is an absolutely beautiful game, and it would be great to see it on a bigger screen, but it’s playing fantastically on the Steam Deck and we can enjoy it natively from day one. If you’ve tried it yourself, I’d love to know whether you’re using the in-game XeSS frame generation or something like MAKO frame generation on the Deck instead.
