Star Wars: Galactic Racer review: Dancing with destruction

Somehow, podracing has returned.

The race starts with a moment of peace, a chance to breathe if you’re skilled enough to take it. Then it starts. The feverish precision of flipping switches in sequence. The machine resists as you pull the trigger, ripping through a final challenge to your commitment before the engine roars to life. The kitbashed demon you’re strapped into cannot be tamed and you both know it. Your opponents look like bugs, creatures surrounding you and threatening to tear you apart the moment you falter. Massaging the throttle, looking for the sweet spot. One, two, three. Punch it. Reality explodes as your surroundings melt and the force of defying gravity locks your body in place. Your focus darts across the essentials: Afterburner. Ramjet meter. Shields. Turn lights. Other racers. Finally, the track, if you can call it such. The strongest opponent. Your landspeeder is a rocket-propelled coffin and all it takes is clipping a big enough rock or driving in direct sunlight too long to show the audience in Jakku what the smouldering remains of a career look like. The stress, the pain, the drama, the risk - it’s all worth it for the rush of surviving against the odds.

Now this is landspeeder/skim speeder/speeder bike racing

Catching me by perhaps the biggest surprise of the year, a Star Wars racing video game has shown me depths of locking the hell in I have not seen before. I’ve been on the edge of my seat, practically leaning off the edge of my couch, eyes focused on every detail I can absorb, feeling every tiny buzz of haptic feedback from that stupid DualSense controller, grit teeth, the works. All for the sake of watching my helmeted, mysterious racer push his impossibly engineered junkyard miracle of a landspeeder beyond its limits. I’ve sweat, I’ve swore, I’ve yelled, I’ve jumped up and ran a therapeutic lap around my apartment, releasing the pent up emotional sludge of fear, tension, anger, and focus into a burst of jubilation after a crucial win. Star Wars: Galactic Racer is intense. It dares you to square up with the jaws of death and pick its teeth for fulfillment. And it hurts so bad when those jaws slam shut on your arms. And it feels so good when they don’t and you make it out alive.

If you ever played Star Wars Episode 1 Racer back in the day, or recently since it’s on Steam now I guess, Fuse Games’ Star Wars Galactic Racer speaks a similar language. It’s an intense, death-defying, bloodsport of a racing game that uses a mixture of Star Wars’ trademark brand of advanced-but-ramshackle technology and cool video game physics to produce a sense of speed even Sonic the Hedgehog would find impressive. And it isn’t just that you’re going fast, it’s that you’re going so fast you can constantly feel the controls slipping from your grasp, with every turn and obstacle dodged feeling like you’ve cheated death. And of course, the stakes are real: hitting a solid part of the environment at the right angle will turn your chosen vehicle into a tumbleweed of fire, smoke, and scrap metal. This time, though, rather than a podracing game, we’re participating in a sort of Wacky Racers-like racing league, comprising three distinct and upgradable vehicle types.

I liked this Star Wars pandering a lot more

See, this game uses Star Wars as a setting, despite its relative simplicity as a racing game, to a much greater effect compared to Star Wars Zero Company. Here’s your real Star Wars scumbag game. Set after the collapse of the Empire, Galactic Racer is about a mode of entertainment only possible when you have the kind of wide-scale political upheaval the post-Empire Star Wars universe can provide. You have racers from all walks of life, from former podracers seeking past glory unfairly taken from them to recently unemployed TIE Fighter pilots sporting Empire insignia tattoos like skinheads inked with Iron Crosses, all working with Frankensteinian monsters of metal and, uh, Space Gasoline or whatever in a desperate attempt to eke out a living and a sense of purpose where either of those things are scarce.

Add in some competition between a Vince McMahon-like promoter running the league locked in corporate combat over control of the league with a silver spoon-suckling, racing prodigy-slash-labor baron dynasty heir, and you have a setup that uses the source material to tell a new kind of story without leaping headfirst into “clap if you recognize this” set-dressing. And when it does finally go there, the restraint and logical placement used in the process makes it awesome. I was going to be vague and spoiler-avoidy, but Sebulba is all over the game’s Steam page so I guess he isn’t a secret. Old man Sebulba rules. And getting to play as him in his podracing glory days in side missions vis-a-vis racing mindset lectures like some hardcore Cranky Kong-type stuff is great fun.

Anyway, you’re Shade, a mysterious, almost Racer X kind of character, a human who reluctantly joins the racing league due to some nasty history between them and the earlier spoiled rich boy champion trying to take over the sport. The story does a good job revealing what happened between them over time, gradually raising the stakes of that conflict within the structure of the race circuit, and making winning that godforsaken race feel just as important as the thrill-seeking lust everyone involved clearly feels when participating in the first place. The vibes are vibing in the campaign, is what I’m getting at here.

I'm sick of roguelikes, but this one can stay

There are a few ways to play, including a totally serviceable multiplayer and some interesting arcadey challenges, but the meat and potatoes is the campaign. Not only is the storytelling kind of awesome, but there’s actually a lot of substance and replay incentive, which is odd for a racing game story mode. The thing I found myself unable to come to a critical stance on for a while, though, is that the campaign is a roguelike. Sometimes that led to even higher stakes and more intense vibes, sometimes it led to frustrations and annoyance over the usual roguelike trimmings of small, gimmicky upgrades and having to start an hours-long run over after losing at the apparent finish line. Upgrading the vehicles after and choosing between different abilities and equippable bonuses was fun, though, and I think the devs did a great job spacing out the win/lose conditions, letting you progress through a run in most cases regardless of your placement.

It does feel kind of alien to have the option to retry a race ripped away, and it makes playing the campaign a significant time commitment for a genre that usually doesn’t ask that of you. It’s an odd duck, but the things it does well really sing, especially when it comes to choosing how much risk you feel like taking on. For example, you’ll encounter elimination races along your runs, which will immediately end them if you don’t finish in the top three. They’re usually pretty avoidable in favor of normal, less punishing normal races, but the rewards they offer are way better. Do you want to play it safe and ensure the run continues, or put everything on the line for extra spoils? Every time I tried an elimination race I could feel the pressure, and definitely made more mistakes early on. But as I got better, I felt a growing urge to go all in. And that feeling of reveling in the risk of it all is so expertly woven throughout Galactic Racer’s storytelling, both in the writing and in what the physics and mechanics convey in action, that the pull to indulge feels all the more natural.

Even when it was pissing me off, Star Wars: Galactic Racer made me feel alive. Every gravity-breaking boost, every panic-inducing malfunction, every slow-motion, Burnout-style wreck, was thrilling in a way I haven’t often experienced. It almost feels like playing Wizardry with cars, pushing ahead and feeding on the rush of risking life and limb, each deadly opportunity for a shortcut or risky boost like kicking open a door and knowing what’s behind it could wipe your party, but doing it anyway. I had some mixed feelings about the campaign’s roguelike structure, but ultimately the way that structure built upon and enhanced the risk-savoring and thrill-seeking intensity made it fit like a thematic glove. I can feel myself coming back to this over and over just for the vibes any time I feel like I need a little shock to my system to get my blood pumping.

Star Wars Galactic Racer is available on October 6, 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PS5 code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Star Wars: Galactic Racer
9
Pros

• Thrill-seeking madness but it's a Star Wars racing game
• Intense sense of speed and danger
• Cool story premise that incorporates lore with restraint and purpose

Cons

• Roguelike structured campaign takes some getting used to and can be annoying in some ways
• Stereotypical roguelike upgrades can feel superfluous and/or silly
• Hard to see what's in front of you sometimes