Star Wars: Galactic Racer has some of the best crashes I've seen in a long time, but with custom builds that incentivize checking yourself before you wreck yourself

The thing about Star Wars vehicles is the best bit might be when they blow up. Think of all those TIE Fighters hitting the walls of the Death Star trenches, or those Stormtroopers with the boxy helmets in the forests of Endor, discovering they have a fatal redwood allergy, or basically anyone driving a podracer who isn't either a horrible wrinkly frogman or a cheery wee lad with a big future in the Space Fascism business. That's still true of Star Wars: Galactic Racer.

Climbing into the driving seat of a Star Wars racing game – and one that comes from Fuse Games, a new studio built by people who previously worked at Criterion, developer of car-crash spectacular Burnout… Well, you'd better believe I'm looking forward to some good old-fashioned explosions.

Technological terror

On this front, Star Wars Galactic Racer does not disappoint. Your vehicle is equipped with two separate boost systems, one of which – the ramjet – is dedicated to smashing into other drivers, sending them off the road and into canyon walls. When you do, you get a takedown cam, just like in Burnout, the wreckage tumbling in gorgeous slow-motion.

Of course, sometimes it's you getting taken down, or just missing your target and slamming into that wall. And sometimes you just hold the ramjet for too long and it overheats and your speeder blows up, right there on the track. And obviously, in all of these cases, by 'you' I mean 'me'.

I crash a lot in Galactic Racer. And while I can still appreciate the slow-motion spectacle that follows, it also hurts – because this is a roguelike. You're allowed three crashes per race, which initially seems generous, but once those lives are all used up, you'll be kicked out of the Galactic Racing League, and have to try again on the next tour.

Each tour takes you across multiple planets, starting on The Force Awakens' Jakku, with a different set of events each time, picked through on a Slay The Spire-style branching map. Along with your standard races, these events also include 'Field Test' time trials, which I don't yet see the appeal of, and Eliminators, which I quickly learn to fear, and love.

Eliminators are like Mario Kart World's Knockout Tour on Spice, where you need to worry not only about crashing out but also your position – find yourself at the back of the pack as you pass the next checkpoint and that's it, yerr out!

As in all the best roguelike games, the blow of starting over is softened by the excitement of trying out a different build, improvised together from whatever comes your way. After each race you're offered a choice of three stat upgrades – you might choose to improve your vehicle's handling or resilience to bumps, or just put it all into an overpowered ramjet.

There's a fourth option, too: skip the upgrade entirely, and just take the credits, to spend at a merchant down the road. And this may well be worth considering, since shops are your best chance to gain parts and, best of all, abilities.

Parts provide passive buffs, giving you a speed boost for landing a jump perfectly, perhaps, or extending how long it takes for your ramjet to overheat and explode. Abilities are gadgets, from energy shields to ion weapons, that you fire off manually and refill on a cooldown. It's a bit like getting to strap a triple red-shell to your kart chassis, permanently.

So now, a few races into a League tour, I've got a speeder I really love, tuned just the way I want it – and I'm down to my third and final life, again. One more crash and I'll lose it all.

My vehicle is in 'systems critical' semi-shutdown, all the holograph readouts are flashing red, the ramjet is disabled. My palms are sweating, my jaw is clenched so tight I can practically hear the dentist telling me off. Not because I care about winning – as long as it's not an Eliminator, your position in a race only affects the rewards you'll get, so I'm happy to be overtaken as long as they keep a nice safe distance. I just want to survive.

All of which is, as far as I'm concerned, utterly brilliant. With the speed everything moves at, the tightness of the track's chokepoints and the pack jostling for position, racing feels dangerous. Just as it should, when you're on the back of a speeder bike, the kind that led so many Scout Troopers to a woody end, or in a driver's seat tethered to two enormous jet engines by some skinny bits of cable. Now that, to misquote the young Vader, is podracing.

So wizard

The only downside of Galactic Racer's single-player roguelike mode, as far as I can see, is that it also attempts to have a story. You play as Shade, the least interesting racer in the entire League – a roster that includes ex-TIE pilot Griff Halloran, making a cameo from the Star Wars Resistance TV show, but also Biddy Blas, a permanently outraged toothy croc-mole creature, and Nik Skandaro, who sounds like he should be in a '90s funk metal band but is actually a kind of pale Darth Maul. (It's still very weird to me that there's an entire species of Maul-alikes, but there we go.)

The helmeted, uncommunicative Shade, meanwhile, is basically a vehicle with legs. This wouldn't matter, but between races the game is keen to fill you in on their backstory. This involves a grudge with League champion Kestar Bool, a deeply posho-coded alien bad'un from a family that runs Shade's home planet and holds their people in indentured servitude.

It's a righteous motivation, for sure, but I'm not convinced this is the right game to tell that tale. It's provided as Shade's reason for joining the League and winning races, but why do you need an excuse? Racing is fun, and winning is great. Even better, in fact, than surviving!

For those of us coveting the galaxy's far, far more interesting racers, though, there's some good news: you can play as any of them in multiplayer, all coming with their own set of built-in abilities. The aforementioned Top Gun-coded Griff Halloran specializes in afterburner – the other, non-ramjet type of boost – while my boy Biddy Blas is a certified Firestarter, shooting flames from his exhaust and happily setting himself on fire.

From these starting points, though, there's still plenty of room to create a custom build. Multiplayer tours are six-event series, where the first five are just a way of earning upgrades to give you the best possible opportunity in the grand finale.

Developer Fuse Games calls this the "build chase", and winning races isn't the only way of getting the good stuff. Before each race you pick one of three Backer Contracts, an extra challenge that will reward you for doing as many jumps as you can, say, or spamming the ramjet. There's also the opportunity to gamble on your finishing position, with riskier bets yielding tastier rewards. So, do you play it safe, only betting that you'll come in the top three-quarters, or cockily back yourself to earn a podium place?

With upgrades being flung out much quicker than in single-player, this condenses down the one-run customization pleasures of the roguelike mode into something shorter, where – because whatever you've built will be thrown away eventually – it's entirely possible to end with a game-breaking combo of abilities. And with the added double-or-nothing deliciousness, and the player rivalries it encourages, those sweaty-palmed pleasures remain intact, even without the knowledge that you could crash and burn out of the entire League.

Check out our best Star Wars games ranking for more galaxy-defining games to play!