Star Wars: Galactic Racer

Can Star Wars: Galactic Racer recapture the high-octane thrills of fan-favourite Star Wars: Episode I: Racer on PlayStation 5 (PS5), XBOX Series X|S and PC?

Star Wars: Gaming's Søren Kamper goes back to Jakku.

Guest post by Søren Kamper

In February, Generation Star Wars looked at the first proper gameplay trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer and wondered whether Lucasfilm Games had finally found a way back to the thrill of Star Wars: Episode I: Racer. That was the obvious question. It was also, as it turns out, slightly unfair to the finished game.

Memories of the 1999 classic have had twenty-seven years to become smoother, faster and rather better behaved than the original hardware ever was. Star Wars: Galactic Racer knows those memories are waiting at the starting line. It gives us podracers, Sebulba and machinery that appears to have been designed by engineers who regarded safety regulations as a challenge. Then it does something more useful: it keeps going.

After spending the last couple of days buried in the campaign, multiplayer and vehicle systems, my biggest surprise is not that Fuse Games understands why Star Wars racing was fun. It is that the studio has found a way to make racing feel like a living part of the galaxy again.

A racer, not a nostalgia exhibit

The first thing Star Wars: Galactic Racer gets right is the simple part that racing games cannot fake: movement feels good.

Landspeeders are broad, physical machines that like to be thrown into corners. Speeder bikes are quicker and far less forgiving. Skim speeders reward smooth lines and a willingness to think about the track in three dimensions. Podracers are the dangerous end of the family tree, and they remain exactly as unreasonable as they should be.

The differences are important because they change how you read a circuit. A corner that feels generous in a landspeeder can become an invitation to disaster on a bike. A gap that looks decorative in one class may become a viable route in another. This is where Star Wars: Galactic Racer starts to separate itself from licensed racing games that offer a garage full of vehicles which all feel suspiciously related.

There is also a welcome amount of aggression. Boost management, heat, contact and takedowns keep races busy without turning them into a floating weapons arena. The Criterion and Burnout heritage around Fuse Games is easy to feel, but Star Wars: Galactic Racer never forgets that the fastest line still matters. Smashing a rival into scenery is satisfying. Doing it while preserving enough speed to make the next corner is better.

The result is immediately readable and surprisingly deep. You can enjoy the spectacle after a few minutes, but there is enough beneath it to reward players who learn the handling rather than simply holding the accelerator and hoping the Force has an unusually generous insurance policy.

The campaign changes what losing means

The stranger decision is the campaign.

Instead of a fixed sequence of races, Shade moves through Tours built around branching events, temporary upgrades and choices about what to risk next. Some progress survives failure, but a strong run can still collapse if you push the wrong machine too far or take one dangerous event too many.

On paper, attaching runs-based design to a Star Wars racing game sounds like something produced during a particularly excitable whiteboard meeting. In practice, it gives the campaign a reason to keep asking questions after the racing itself has already proved enjoyable.

Do you take the event with the better reward, even though the vehicle is already carrying damage? Do you improve straight-line speed or make the next few corners easier? Do you keep leaning into the build that is working, or spend resources preparing for a weakness you know is coming?

That makes failure more interesting than a normal restart screen. A bad race can affect the next one. A good part can reshape the rest of a Tour. A vehicle that felt ordinary at the start can become a wonderfully specific little monster by the final events.

It also means the game avoids the old racing-game problem where progression becomes a list of cups to tick off. Galactic Racer has a rhythm of preparation, risk, recovery and another attempt. I often found myself telling myself that one more event would be enough for the evening. This was rarely true. For readers who want the nuts-and-bolts version of the systems, Star Wars: Gaming's complete Star Wars: Galactic Racer guide goes much deeper into the campaign, vehicles and progression.

The Galactic League feels like Star Wars from the side streets

The setting helps. Shade enters the Galactic League after the fall of the Empire, in a galaxy where military hardware, old rivalries and people with questionable employment histories have all found their way into an underground racing culture. That gives the game a useful distance from the usual Star Wars obsession with galactic destiny.

Nobody needs to save the Force before bedtime. Nobody is waiting to reveal that a minor mechanic is secretly descended from somebody important. The world works because Star Wars has always been full of machines, smugglers, gamblers, pilots and people making a living in places the films only pass through.

That fits nicely with the point we made in our earlier Generation Star Wars feature about how Lucasfilm Games kept the galaxy alive between movies. Games are often at their best when they take a familiar corner of Star Wars and ask what everyday life might actually look like there. Star Wars: Galactic Racer turns that idea into motorsport.

The paddocks are a big part of the effect. Walking around between events, talking to rivals and mechanics, and seeing the League as a community gives the campaign personality. Kestar Bool provides the obvious target, while Hibi and the wider cast make the competition feel less like a menu and more like a travelling circus with engines.

There is a price for that ambition. The story and the runs-based structure do not always move at the same pace. Sometimes the next conversation arrives exactly when the campaign needs it. At other times, the game asks you to walk across the paddock when every part of your brain is already sitting on the next starting grid.

It never becomes a serious problem, but Star Wars: Galactic Racer is better at making me care about the League than it is at making Shade the most interesting person in it.

The galaxy is beautiful at several hundred kilometres per hour

The environments are frequently spectacular.

Jakku is an obvious highlight because racing through the wreckage of the Galactic Civil War gives the game an immediate sense of scale. The remains of Star Destroyers stop being background scenery and become geography. Elsewhere, ice, industrial structures, caves and hostile terrain change both the look and the rhythm of the circuits.

The downside is that tracks sharing the same planet can occasionally blend together. Star Wars: Galactic Racer has strong worlds, but not every individual circuit has the one unforgettable corner, hazard or silhouette that makes a racing track live in the memory for years.

That is one area where Star Wars: Episode I: Racer still casts a long shadow. The old game could be crude, but its best courses had sections you remembered instantly. Generation Star Wars revisited Star Wars: Episode I: Racer when the classic returned on Nintendo Switch in 2020, and that comparison is useful because the new game ultimately succeeds by refusing to behave like a remake. The older title is still there in the DNA, especially when podracers arrive, but Star Wars: Galactic Racer is not trying to preserve 1999 under glass.

Multiplayer keeps the garage door open

The online side gives the game another reason to last beyond the campaign.

Multiplayer Tours carry the same build mentality into competition, letting temporary setups develop across a sequence rather than treating every race as an isolated event. That makes the garage choices matter online too. You are not only racing another player, but you are also racing the decisions that got both of you to the grid.

At its best, this creates wonderful chaos. Players arrive with different strengths, different levels of confidence and, judging by some of the opening laps, very different opinions about whether braking is mandatory.

At its worst, the same chaos can become noise. A large group, aggressive contact and environmental hazards can turn a clean plan into debris very quickly. That will delight some players more than others. I enjoy the fact that Star Wars: Galactic Racer allows races to become stories, but competitive players looking for clinical purity may occasionally want the galaxy to calm down.

Still, multiplayer feels like an extension of the central design rather than a box ticked on the back of the package. That matters.

Verdict

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has rough edges. The story occasionally interrupts the momentum it is trying to build, some circuits within the same world need more individual character, and the game can become gloriously messy when too many systems collide at once.

None of that changes the central result.

The racing itself is excellent. The vehicle classes genuinely alter how the game is played. The campaign makes upgrades and failure meaningful without burying the fun beneath spreadsheets. The Galactic League gives Star Wars racing a culture rather than simply a collection of tracks.

Most importantly, Fuse Games has not spent twenty-seven years staring backwards.

When Generation Star Wars covered the gameplay trailer earlier this year, the easy hope was that Star Wars: Galactic Racer might be a worthy successor to Star Wars: Episode I: Racer. It is. The more interesting achievement is that, after a few hours, being a successor stops feeling like the most important thing about it.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer has its own identity, its own rhythm and enough ideas to survive once the first wave of nostalgia has passed. Star Wars racing did not need another museum piece. It needed somewhere new to go.

After a very long wait, it finally has one.

Score: 8.5/10

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Are you playing Star Wars: Galactic Racer? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Søren Ahrensborg Kamper has written about Star Wars games, their history and the communities around them since 2009. He is the editor of Star Wars: Gaming, where he covers new releases, game history and the strange decisions that become much more reasonable once somebody adds a hyperdrive.