Both a surprisingly fun Roguelite campaign and a racing treat for Criterion fans, this is just wonderful stuff.

A few years ago, I had the chance to ask Alex Ward, the co-founder of Criterion Games, about the driving model for the Burnout series. I had heard from a friend that beneath the arcadey immediacy lay physics of rare nuance and beauty. I was reverent in my questioning, even if I was slightly clueless - is it a driving model or a handling model or a physics model? - and Ward, thankfully, was having none of it. He told me that in the very early Burnout games, the cars, such as they were, didn't actually have wheels. How's that for nuance.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer, then, with its landspeeders and podracers, all of them ghosting over the ground on some kind of blurry antigrav cushion, is a kind of homecoming. Ward may not be involved, but Fuse Games, the developer, has an awful lot of Criterion DNA coiled up inside it. If you're like me, and you've come to accept the fact, over the years, that Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise are, together, the most thrilling video games ever made, that's a good thing. But even if you know nothing at all about Burnout, you're going to have a very pleasant time here.

I'm starting with Burnout rather than Star Wars because I feel like Galactic Racer does that too. Sure there's some lovely faux-Williams music to kick us off, twinkly and intriguing out in space, martial and brooding down on the planets, and we're wedged somewhere in the timeline between Episode 6 and Episode 7. There are droids and desert planets and fish-headed aliens. But the game came alive for me in my first race, on my first corner, when I realised that if I was playing Burnout, I would press a particular face button right about now to ignite boost for the first time. Purely running on muscle memory I pushed the button while the thought was occurring to me. And I got the same boost. The same feeling. I was jolted back in my chair. Speed, yes, but the horizon seemed to broaden and shimmer. I was home.

A dozen little similarities followed over those first races. The crash cam, when you knock someone else off the road, still swoops backwards to catch the tumbling wreckage and then rushes forward to catch up with you as it did in Burnout 3. There may be no wheels involved, but there's still a grippy sense (if slightly diminished, as is, just slightly, the sense of weight) that pulls you to the ground and seems to hold you there, the center of gravity in the very middle of your speeding machine. Takedowns are still called Takedowns! Boost indulged at the right moment can still change everything. You are still encouraged - and I will put this delicately - to drive like a deeply mean-spirited son of a bitch. This is not a game for polite daytime racers. It wants you to grit your teeth so hard that they start to turn to dust.

All of this is a wonderful basis for a Star Wars game, it turns out, and this is where we actually get to the Galaxy Far Far Away. Burnout slots into this universe so well because the take on Star Wars that Fuse is pursuing is the junky/formidable technology side. Forget Jedis and wookies and midiclorians, a word I am only slightly surprised to discover that Google cannot autocorrect, so knock yourself out. Forget all that stuff. This is the Star Wars of the Millennium Falcon, which needs to be thumped just so before its engines start, and which is a thing of switches and buttons and which shudders dangerously when it drops out of hyperspace. It's the Star Wars of landcraft that's fast as heck but rusty and looks like the back panel of a refrigerator. It's the Star Wars of malfunctioning droids that shower sparks and squeal and are always ready to throw off loose parts.

The extent to which Galactic Racer delivers this sense of brilliant, decrepit, nearly ruined technology is astonishing. And I can't really tell you about it in one go, because it gets right to the heart of all the different pieces that make this game work.

So take boosting. This is a little piece of genius, I think: Galactic Racer has not one boost but two. The first is called Afterburner and it feels a lot like Burnout's boost. Hold down a button and you go like heck until the boost bar is drained. (At which point, unlike Burnout, it will generally refill on its own.) This boost is fun and in any other game it might even be overpowered. But in Galactic Racer it's... it's fine. In Galactic Racer, it's the safe option.

And this is because of the other boost, which is known as the Ramjet. This boost is much faster, and when it charges up you have to switch over to it with a stab of a thumbstick. This here is what I'm talking about in terms of the game's delivery of brilliantly terrible technology. There is this thump and shudder when you switch over from Afterburner to Ramject that suggests somewhere in the dark spaces of your rattling craft, mechanical things are moving about and realigning themselves. That sound effect alone is just magic.

But that's just the sound effect! They great thing about Ramjet is it's a better boost than Afterburner but it's also dangerous. Leave it on too long and you get in to a section of the boost bar that's known as redlining. An alarm starts to sound - the same alarm I often hear when I'm in dreams in which I have to pilot a 747 and I don't know what any of the buttons do - and then, give it long enough, and you explode.

To boost or not to boost, then? That was the eternal Burnout conundrum. Now it's to boost or to boost in a way that might kill you? And it's all channeled through the experience of driving these wonderfully clanky metal beasts around at high speeds.

Two boosts suggests a layer of strategy to the racing, and it's here we probably need to get at the game's main conceit. I've delayed it a little, but in truth, I spent a pleasant hour enjoying this return to Burnout-land without noticing it myself. Anyway: Galactic Racer's campaign is a Roguelite.

And even this is all about the tech. You pick between one of three craft types, from dependable Landspeeders to darting, bad-at-corners, Speederbikes and Skim Speeders, the royalty of the race track that can turn on their sides for extra manoeuvrability but also come with a bit of a learning curve. Pick one of these guys and then you're off into a series of races split across a series of acts but also a series of planets. You make decisions on what event to select next via one of those FTL-style branching path maps that are everywhere these days.

Decisions! You choose between races, elimination races, story-based encounters with other racers, and even chances to take a bespoke craft out for a special event. All the while you're trying to earn enough money from each race to kit out your vehicle and make it as fast and as powerful as it can so that you can finish first in the final race of the act and move forward. And yes, if you lose that final race - or if you crash out in an eliminator - you go back to the start with all those additions to your machine lost. (Although being a Roguelite rather than a Roguelike, your starting machines do get better over time.)

Into this structure, the game pours an awful lot of stuff, more than enough to make each run feel unique. You're racing against a set cast of other racers, but your relationships with them may change from one playthrough to the next depending on whether you make deals with them, swap parts with them or develop rivalries. But more importantly there's the stuff you do to your craft. Each race leaves you with cash to buy new parts, as well as core upgrades to your machine's basic stats, and perhaps even new abilities that work a little like the kinds of things you might get in Mario Kart. Maybe you want mines to drop on the field. Maybe you want a burst of auto pilot. Maybe you want to do something nasty to others when you crash.

The best way to talk about the interaction of all of this stuff - parts and abilities and upgrades - is to tell you that in my last run, I put all my points into two stats: one measuring how robust my craft was when it came to running into walls, and another that measured how much Afterburner I had. I ignored everything else - my Ramjet, my cornering abilities, all that crucial jazz. And I did this because I was picking parts that extended my Afterburner and also extended how fast it recharged. And then I doubled down on abilities that granted me autopilot. By the time I had reached the final races, I was almost always boosting, and I was simultaneously almost never doing any actual steering. I had hacked together a deeply unwise build and I was utterly committed to it. (Sadly it eroded my skills to the point that when I had to start over without autopilot I just rammed into walls endlessly.)

Add to all this Racer Styles that foreground different approaches and Favours, which act as selectable load-outs of perks, and you have a Roguelite with a surprising range of variables. Don't take what I've just said above and mark this down as the game where you can just rely on autopilot, by the bye. You can play through the game for hours without touching autopilot. But if you're a weirdo, you can find some wonderfully weird ways to play this game.

This stuff, as is the way of Roguelites, is both dizzyingly complex and utterly simple. Parts, Racer Styles, Favours etc: they're all good things that might happen to you. And out on the race track there are bad things that might happen to you too. If you sustain damage and you fumble recovery, you will lose one of your parts and you'll have to work without that 25 percent boost, say, until you get it fixed in between planets. Maybe you fall out with a rival in a story encounter and then the next time you start a race - there's a wonderful bit of business where you tap in codes to bring each of your machine's systems online early, and it feels just like flicking overhead switches in an X-Wing - rather than zipping into the distance, you just explode. You just explode.

Luckily, Galactic Racer never forgets that between the loot and the loadout and the story choices this is still a racing game. And with that we're back to Burnout - and back to Star Wars, somehow. The game has that ceaseless full-ahead pelt that Burnout offers and each corner is a set-piece, even before you tip your Skim Speeder onto one edge. But different planets don't just have their own looks, they have their own impacts. Icy worlds make your Ramjet cooler and longer-lasting. Toxic worlds will corrode you if you spend too long racing over lakes of lurid acid. Desert worlds will bake you to the point where it might be worth leaving the Ramjet off as much as possible. Your call.

These worlds don't just look beautiful, from Jakku's dunes and wrecked Star Destroyers you must thread between to Crait's white crystalline surface with red dust billowing underneath. They're also carved up into fascinating tracks that blend tight underground corridors where cornering is a constant discussion with death, and daringly wide-open outside sections where I once got so turned around I ended up going backwards. These are places that constantly shift in the way that they challenge you, and I suspect that better racers than me will spend an awfully long time working out the optimal strategies for handling each one.

All of that and it's Star Wars, down to the Droids passing by in the on-foot sections between races where you visit the shop and chat to your rivals, and down to the glimpse of a very familiar targeting computer I saw on the dashboard of a new craft I just unlocked. Down even to the wonderful array of English regional accents that suggest dayplayers doing their bits at Elstree Studios. And it's also a lovely suite of racing options, with arcade modes and a suite of themed mini-tours and multiplayer one-offs and multiplayer micro-campaigns, and even a little Pod Racing thrown in. It's new games, with Roguelite choices and endless unlockables, and it's also old games, with cruel and ingenious courses where everything can be lost in an instant. It's a Galaxy Far, Far Away, and it's also Paradise City.

A copy of Star Wars: Galactic Racer was provided for this review by Secret Mode.