What was perhaps less understood ahead of release was that Fuse was set on extending some of this thinking into multiplayer, too. During the review phase, I booted up multiplayer with the dim expectation that it would be a standard affair that defanged Galactic Racer‘s design and blunted its originality in pursuit of a strictly level playing field. I was wrong. After further testing on live servers, I’m ready to call this the best multiplayer racing mode in years. I expect it will be quite influential.

A vanilla quick race mode with no upgrades is available, but it’s not the main attraction. That comes in the form of Multiplayer Tour. (There’s also a Podracing variant.) Multiplayer Tour is a six-race, 12-player tournament that plays out like a condensed version of the runs in the game’s campaign mode (albeit with no fail state). The first five races constitute a build phase during which you acquire skills, parts, and upgrades for your racer. Then you put them to the test in a capstone championship event.

Multiplayer tour is brilliantly conceived and surprisingly well-balanced, considering it is essentially the campaign mode on fast-forward. To begin with, you select a character from a list that unlocks over time as you accrue multiplayer XP. Each has starting skills and traits that play into a specialized archetype: an afterburner specialist, a weapons technician, a type that focuses on cooling ramjets and another that gains extra boost when redlining them. Whilst it’s not prescriptive, your choice gives you a slightly more pronounced focus than the racer styles in the campaign, nudging you helpfully toward certain parts and upgrades.

Image: Fuse Games/Secret Mode

In between each race, you have 90 seconds to collect your winnings, allocate triple upgrade points, and spend credits on new parts or skills to flesh out your build. It’s enough time, just. But this isn’t all. Galactic Racer adds some wrinkles that add some appropriately roguish Outer Rim flavor as well as spicing up both the build-crafting and the racing action.

After completing your upgrades, you can use any remaining time to accept a backer contract and bet on where you will finish: in the top nine, top six, or top three. The contracts reward extra credits and XP for in-race feats like spending time at high speed or airborne, using your afterburner, or taking down other racers. They encourage certain playstyles or racing lines and increase your spending power in the upgrade rounds.

The bets, meanwhile, reward you with additional parts of increasing quality according to where you think you’ll finish. It’s tempting to aim high, but if you don’t place where you predict, you get nothing. It can be better to make a conservative bet and bank the free part, especially since these reward parts are usually more relevant to your current build than those available to buy.

It’s satisfying to feel a build come together in double-quick time as you advance through the build round, and good build strategy can do a lot to make up for a skill deficit or a bad result. Players are incentivized to persevere with a tour, because your results can improve with smart choices and lucky pulls. It’s striking that I haven’t noticed many low-placed players quitting after the first race or two, as they do in so many other racing games’ online championship modes.

The best thing about Galactic Racer‘s multiplayer is that it feels like Galactic Racer‘s single-player. It’s a Star Wars fantasy about betting on yourself and cobbling together a rickety hod rod of a racing machine. But it’s also an extremely cleverly designed multiplayer mode in its own right, with quick-fire choices, smart risk-reward mechanics, satisfying specialization paths that unfold from scratch in every single tour, and a talent for keeping players invested all the way through the field. Other racing game developers should be studying it very closely.