STAR WARS™ Episode I Racer

I've spent enough Saturday nights running arcade racers with friends to know when a game's core loop is genuinely fun versus when nostalgia is doing most of the heavy lifting. With Episode I Racer, it's honestly a bit of both, and the version you're playing matters more than you'd expect. The racing itself holds up. You pick from a roster of over 25 podracers - Anakin, Sebulba, the wonderfully bizarre Ben Quadinaros and about twenty more aliens with increasingly unhinged vehicle designs - and tear across 25 tracks spread across eight worlds, from Tatooine's canyon runs to the prison moon of Oovo IV. The afterburner mechanic is the heart of it: hold boost too long and your engines overheat, catch fire, and blow up, costing you precious seconds on respawn. You can actively repair damage mid-race but it bleeds your speed while you do it, so there's a constant push-pull between going fast and keeping your pod in one piece. Shortcuts are tucked into most tracks, and finding a clean line through a tight corridor at what the game cheerfully calls 600-plus mph still feels good. The prize money loop - race, earn credits, visit Watto's shop, upgrade top speed and acceleration - gives the tournament mode just enough structure to keep you clicking through circuits. Here is where I have to be straight with you about the PC version specifically. The multiplayer on PC is LAN-only, using a deprecated network protocol, which in practice means getting friends into the same online session is a project rather than a pastime. There is no split-screen on PC - that was a console-exclusive feature - and there is no online matchmaking. If your group of four wanted couch co-op pod racing, this particular storefront version cannot deliver that. Controller support also requires some manual setup effort; keyboard is technically playable but genuinely awkward for a game that rewards precise throttle control. A gamepad is the minimum viable way to play, and even then community forums note that running the game above 30fps can break the physics in ways that make the AI opponents feel slower than they should be, which feeds into the widely reported complaint that difficulty is embarrassingly gentle until the very late Invitational circuit. The visuals are what they are. Original N64-era geometry, low-poly racer models, textures that were never meant to be seen at HD resolutions. The sense of speed in the race itself papers over most of that, but menu screens and cutscenes look rough. Community mods do meaningfully improve the visuals if you're willing to spend ten minutes on setup, and that extra step is probably worth it on PC. Audio on the PC release has a reputation for compressed, buggy music playback - Duel of the Fates loops endlessly and can still feel tinny depending on your setup. Who actually wants this? Prequel-era Star Wars fans who want to revisit the best sequence from that film, solo players who enjoy a short tournament grind with a light upgrade loop, and people hunting lap time records in Free Race mode. If you never played it in 1999 and want the cleanest experience today, the console re-releases are technically the better-maintained versions. But if you're already here on PC and the price is right, the moment you punch the afterburner through an anti-gravity tunnel and just barely save your exploding engine with a mid-race repair, you'll understand exactly why this thing sold millions.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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