Star Wars: Galactic Racer review

It’s 1999, and Star Wars: Episode I Racer has hit the N64, Dreamcast, and PC. In Racer, we raced our way through countless tracks on countless planets on our way to podracing stardom. We got to play as Anakin Skywalker, Sebulba, Teemto Pagalies, Altar Beedo, and more. In 2002, we got Star Wars: Racer Revenge, a non-canon story of Anakin Skywalker returning to Tatooine to free the slaves and show up Sebulba once again. Other than the 2001 Super Bombad Racing, we haven’t had a chance to really return to podracing.

But in 2026; Fuse Games, Secret Mode, and Lucasfilm Games bring us… Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Since the game announcement, this has been on my most highly anticipated list. I had a chance to play the demo and talk to the developers at Fuse Games at Summer Game Fest and loved my time with it. So much so that I awarded the game one of our Best of Summer Game Fest awards! However, the demo couldn’t have prepared me for the wild ride that is Star Wars: Galactic Racer. 

Gameplay and Gaming Experience

If you’ve played and liked Burnout or one of the Podracing games I mentioned above, you’re going to love the feel of Galactic Racer. In order to take you through the gameplay, I want to describe a race to you from start to finish. 

You have a choice between Landspeeder, Skim Speeder, and Speeder Bike. My favorite has been the Skim Speeder as the turns are tighter, it feels faster, and I love the look. 

• Landspeeders: The most balanced vehicle. It’s great at drifting and keeping speed up throughout the race. It’s somewhat durable, but you don’t want to take too bad a beating. 
• Speeder Bikes: Small and fast. Takes some time to get a handle of the turning you’ll need to learn. Their main positives are the extremely high speed and their ability Kenetic Burst to give you an extra push.
• Skim Speeders: A new vehicle to the Star Wars universe with high speeds and intense turns. Their afterburners are legendary but burn out quickly, so use it wisely. 

You’re shown the track you’re racing on, with a beautifully detailed set of visuals that feature everything from the course itself to creatures, vehicles, droids, and more. The grand feel of this moment can be skipped, but I skipped this maybe once because I was redoing a section. 

The camera fixes on your racer as you do your pre-check button mini-game to try and activate any abilities you may have, but at the base level to get your racer up and running. You’ll then hit the button to activate your engines. This really makes you feel like you’re at the beginning of The Phantom Menace’s Podracing scene as you can mess up and start without abilities or backed up without your engines online. 

You want to get a perfect timing launch and off you go! The start of the race is chaos. You have racers trying to get ahead, while some racers start the violence early, smashing into other racers. These can be a make or break moments in some race styles like Elimination races, so be careful not to get too far to the back of the pack. 

As you continue, the name of the game is to go fast and not crash. Some races can be extremely complicated with tight turns and lots of secret routes you can find. Others are all about pure speed and agility. Can your racer handle the speed while surviving the course itself and other racers? 

Drifting is your friend, and it feels so satisfying to get a turn perfect and not lose Ramjet speeds. While it might take some time to fully figure out, once you do, it feels god-tier as someone who loves drifting in any racing game over most abilities. 

While on your run, you can crash only so many times before you get a DNF and your race is over (at least in Campaign Mode). You can also suffer System Malfunctions that disable your racer and leave you having to click a button at the exact right time in order to get back on course, reminding me a lot of the time Anakin had to try and fix his Pod mid-race. 

By the end, I was generally always at the edge of my seat. Not only does the racing feel fast, the bullying of other players is violent and dangerous, and the music, THE MUSIC just keeps everything feeling definitively Star Wars. The amount of times I would finish a race and audibly cheer and fall back on my couch in celebration was… a lot more than my dog appreciated. 

The planets themselves create hazards. Jakku is hot and your boosts will overheat faster. Ando Prime is cold and will freeze your steering if you don’t heat up your racer. Lantaana will have plenty of water to keep you cool but also lava to burn you up. Each one provides a different challenge making the tour between worlds more difficult to navigate. My favorite planet to race on was Lantaana as I loved the jungle vibe with the lava mixed in throughout the track. There are some other planets that aren’t anywhere on the website that are extremely fun, but you can find those for yourself. 

Races of all types have their merits and I never found myself hating to see one coming, even if I was redoing a section or having to replay a moment in the Arcade. It never felt like the game “took” anything from me; it was my skill vs the other racers and sometimes it wasn’t my time. I also never ran into any glitches or crashes with my time playing on the Xbox Series X. 

Galactic Racer feels fluid and fun from start to finish, exactly like you’d want a Star Wars racing game to feel. 

Campaign Mode

I've played a lot of Star Wars campaign modes. In fact, I’ve played them all. So when I say that this Campaign Mode was one of the most fun to play through that I’ve ever done; I’m not exaggerating. Depending on how many times you have to do each act, this Campaign Mode takes 8-12 hours to fully complete. At least, if you do all side races and talk with the characters you can on each planet.

This mode has several difficulty settings which change the game entirely. I’d suggest everyone starting with the Pilot difficulty and moving from there. Some of these moments can get real fast, real quick, and Pilot is the best way to learn it all at one time. 

After playing through a small little intro of the vehicles allowed in the Galactic League, you land on Jakku as Shade. Shade is a helmet-wearing human from Gathleon who has been invited to participate by Darius Pax, the Besalisk organizer of the League itself. His desire to bring you in stems from the horrible Kestar Bool trying to steal the League from under his nose as the League Champion. Darius provides you with your first League Token, the item that allows you to stay in the League run you’re on. If you lose too many times, get eliminated from an Elimination Run, etc; you can lose this token and be forced to start over. 

Your partner in crime is an Ardennian technician who helps you bring your racing dreams to life. Every part, every upgrade, every ability, comes through Hibi’s approval and she’s with you until the very end. 

As you continue you’ll gain access to Backers who will provide you with resources for wins and doing achievements. Most of the time I’d pick ones that had to do with speed and just rack up the credits. Lose, and these Backers will make you feel like poodoo for it!

Along the way, you’ll meet several characters including the god-tier racer himself, Sebulba (who has an interesting place in the story that I refuse to be the one to spoil), Griff Halloran from Star Wars: Resistance, Nil Skandaro, Goli and 02-R0, and so many more. One of my favorite parts of the Campaign was getting to know these characters, for better or for worse. Some of these characters will actually be “rivals” as you continue, providing boosts for beating them, voting for them in the betting phases, and defeating them in one-on-one races that can provide League Tokens. 

The Campaign Mode takes place over three acts with each one progressively getting harder and harder. By Act 3, I was so invested that I simply kept going, and when I lost due to a night time race (my racer didn’t have enough headlights) I got actively angry – something I tend not to do in gaming. However, this isn’t because the game did anything wrong. It threw something at me that I hadn’t prepared for, giving me a chance to recalibrate and come back better than before. 

In between each try or between each act you can upgrade and customize your racer. Customization is deep with multiple skills to upgrade, abilities to add-on, bonuses to add from characters you’ve interacted with in the Campaign, and plenty of visual cosmetics. I built my racer, which I called The Vulpix, to be all about speed and keeping the ramjets going as long as I could. All abilities were about cooling down or refreshing the ramjet, while all of the parts I added helped keep things as smooth as possible. While I went FAST, it left me vulnerable to attack. Yes, racers want to see you dead as much as you want to win, so some take it upon themselves to target and attack you. My response was to add a Shield ability which gave me 10 seconds of shielding.

Something to keep in mind is that, as you crash or have system malfunctions in this mode, is that some of your abilities can be taken from you or manipulated in the worst ways. Since my racer was all about speed, when I had a malfunction, it would impact my ability to go fast. For example, one made my racer start to corrode (too much corrosion and the racer explodes) if I used all of my speed boost to exhaustion. Learning why my racer was corroding took me a minute, but once I figured it out, it became a war of slowing down at the right time. You can get these parts fixed in between planets, for a price.

You travel from planet to planet racing 4-5 races (depending on where you are in the story) and have everything from point-to-point races, lap races, elimination races, time trials, mystery instances, and more. You also have what I liked to call, “Story Time’s with Sebulba” where he tells you about his grand adventures in racing that you get to play through. Podracing itself has a very interesting inclusion in the Campaign Mode that any Star Wars fan will find exciting and enjoyable to play through. When the developers told me to wait and see, I now know why they wanted it to be a surprise. 

Act 3 provides a huge opportunity for some amazing things to happen. However, the surprise is simply too much fun to spoil in this review, so go play the game and enjoy the ride (or rides) through the Galactic League. 

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is a BLAST and the crossplay was flawless in my three runs in the Multiplayer Tour. In Multiplayer, you’ll have four main modes: 

• Multiplayer Tour: This is 12 players and you’ll go through five planets with a final arena race. This is fast-paced and formatted similarly to Campaign Mode except the race-types have less variety. You have a build phase that leads into the final race. Make sure you're thinking long run as the final race follows suit with the final parts of the campaign and will have a gauntlet. In my three Tours, I was able to go from Rank 1 to Rank 9 with me joining my third Tour late. This takes about 30 minutes start to finish.
• Podracing Tour: Podracing, back to back, go fast and try not to die quickly. This feels chaotic and is chaotic. A lot going on at all times. Same as Multiplayer Tour, you have a build phase leading into a final race to prove who the best Podracer is once and for all!
• You then have Quick Race and Quick Podrace that will be there if you need something faster. I did not participate in these two modes and focused on the tours.

I found myself at the edge of my seat just like with the Campaign Mode. However, these races will have lasting impacts as the ranking system feels great. The servers worked well during our early session, and you can try out characters not named Shade as you progress through the ranking system. Seeing everyone’s racers made me want to continue trying the Speeder Bike, as those things are ZOOMING in Multiplayer. 

The betting portions made the games even more chaotic as you can bet on yourself for the first races while betting on which of your opponents (or yourself) might win the final race. If multiple people bet on the same person, you'll be splitting the XP bonus with the other racers who guessed that person.

One thing I didn’t have as much of an issue with in Campaign Mode that we have here in Multiplayer is the random moments of chaos. Someone throwing down a bomb at the start, scattering everyone into each other and the walls made for some pretty insane moments. Alongside that, just because I was fast didn’t mean others weren't just as fast or faster, so adapting will be the game.

Multiplayer should be a ton of fun with even more full lobbies and the ability to bring your friends along for the ride should make things even better!

Scenarios

Scenarios put you in the cockpits of other racers not named Shade. You’re going to get a chance to go through multiple races with these racers trying to get the top spot and earn the goodies that come with those wins. 

These are not overly long; most I played are four races. However, they can be quite difficult depending on how comfortable you are driving someone else’s racer. For me, because I played a lot of Landspeeder and Skim Speeder, it wasn’t overly difficult to get the hang of these suped up racers. However, I didn’t play a ton of Speeder Bike, so those left me needing to take more time. 

Arcade

This is where you can jump right in on almost any race type including Podracing, time trials, trials on acid, lava, ice, etc planets, and some advanced modes you will have fun exploring for yourself. If you’re looking to show the game off to friends, you only have so much time, or you just want to practice some maneuvers to get better for the Campaign Mode, this is a section that will be very helpful. 

There is a lot here, so this area of the menu can feel a bit overwhelming. However, once you start, it’s addicting and I wanted to try and get the best score or time for every single one. If you’re really wanting to try Podracing early, Arcade gives you access to play as Sebulba upon opening the game for the first time. 

No use waiting around, they’re fast, go fast.