Star Wars: Galactic Racer Review — Podracing Is Back, and It's Brilliant

It's been 24 years since the last Star Wars racing game, and this Star Wars Galactic Racer review can confirm the wait was worth it. Fuse Games' debut — a studio built from ex-Criterion Burnout veterans — is the best arcade racer in years: a roguelite podracing revival that's frantically fast, genuinely tense, and only held back by a thin track list and some rough edges around the campaign's off-track bits. It earns its 8.5.

You play Shade, a nobody pilot grinding through the Galactic League, an unsanctioned Outer Rim racing circuit bankrolled by syndicates after the fall of the Empire. Standing between you and the top is Kestar Bool, the reigning champion. The hook is the run-based campaign: each run is a fresh attempt through a shuffled calendar of events, with sponsors offering upgrades between races — including, memorably, a racing-loving Hutt gangster who drops you if you fail too often. Lose, and the run ends. Start over.

The Roguelite Structure Is the Whole Game

Racing games have tried everything to add stakes — rivals systems, wager races, permadeath ladders — and most of it has felt bolted on. Galactic Racer's run structure feels native to the genre instead. Because a crashed run costs you the whole calendar, every overtake in the final lap carries weight that a standard cup ladder can't manufacture. It also solves racing's oldest problem: once you've won everything, there's nothing left. Here, the reshuffled calendar and sponsor upgrade paths make repeat runs meaningfully different, not just the same tracks in reverse.

PC Gamer's reviewer, who scored it 76/100, still argued the run structure shakes up the format more successfully than Burnout Paradise's open world did — which is a pointed compliment given who made this game. The format isn't perfect; roguelite fans will recognize the familiar frustration of losing 40 minutes of progress to one bad crash. But I'll take a racer that occasionally makes me furious over one that never makes me feel anything.

It Handles Like Burnout, Looks Like a Movie

Four vehicle classes — landspeeders, speeder bikes, skim speeders, and podracers — each with genuinely different handling, and all of them razor-sharp. The speed feel is pure Criterion lineage: aggressive, drift-happy, and just barely under control. Brutal takedowns are back in spirit, and threading a podracer through a branching canyon route at full tilt is the closest thing to the Episode I podrace sequence that a game has ever produced.

The six racing worlds — Jakku, Tatooine, Ando Prime, Lantaana, Sentinel I, and Derven Acos — are hand-built rather than procedurally generated, and it shows. Learning a circuit matters, which is fundamental to a good racing game, and the tracks reward that knowledge with alternate lines and risk-reward shortcuts. The soundtrack, composed by Gordy Haab, does a lot of heavy lifting too: the final laps feel like movie climaxes, not menu music with engine noise.

It's no surprise the game sits at 87 on OpenCritic with 97% of critics recommending it, or that Eurogamer handed it 5/5. This is easily the highest-rated Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic, and in a stacked October — Gears of War: E-Day and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve both landed to serious acclaim — Galactic Racer still stands out as the month's most pleasant surprise.

Why This Star Wars Galactic Racer Review Lands at 8.5

Because the highs are so high that the flaws feel like personal insults. The biggest one: six planets isn't enough. IGN's 8/10 review flagged the repetition, and after a dozen runs, you feel it — you revisit the same circuits until every corner is muscle memory, and runs start to blur together. For a game built on replayability, a thin track list is a structural problem, not a nitpick.

Then there's the stuff around the racing. The walkable paddocks between events, where you wander on foot, feel like filler — Kotaku called them stale, and they're right. Fuse are vehicle specialists; the on-foot segments slow down exactly the momentum the racing builds. There's also no free play mode, which is a strange omission for the genre. You can't just pick a favorite track and race it.

Multiplayer Needs Another Lap

Quick-play multiplayer won't let you choose tracks, the arcade suite is limited to time trial, controls can't be rebound on any platform, and cross-platform party setup is fiddlier than it should be in 2026. None of this ruins the game — the campaign is the main event and it works offline — but the multiplayer feels like it shipped a patch or two early.

None of these are fatal. They're the difference between an 8.5 and a 9.5. Giant Bomb went all the way to 10/10 and I understand why: when Galactic Racer is good, it's the best arcade racing in a generation. But a review should be honest about the ceiling, and right now the ceiling is "superb racer with a thin track list," not "genre-defining classic."

Who should buy it:

• Arcade racing fans who miss the Burnout / MotorStorm era — this is your game.
• Star Wars fans who've waited since 2002's Racer Revenge for a proper podracing game.
• Anyone who likes roguelites but is tired of the genre meaning "Hades clone."
• Skip it for now if you mostly play multiplayer with a regular crew — the party and track-select limitations will annoy you.

Fuse Games built their first game like a studio with nothing to prove and everything to show. Star Wars: Galactic Racer is fast, tense, gorgeous, and just flawed enough to keep it human. The 24-year wait for a new Star Wars racer ended better than anyone had a right to expect.