Star Wars: Galactic Racer Review - The Burnout DNA Shows, and That's a Compliment

Star Wars racing games have a weird history. One genuinely great podracer in 1999, then decades of nothing. So when a studio founded by ex-Criterion people - the Burnout crowd - announced an anti-grav racer with a roguelite campaign, I was curious and nervous in equal measure. Having put the better part of a week into it, I'm mostly relieved.

What it is

Star Wars: Galactic Racer launched on 6 October 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, developed by Fuse Games and published by Secret Mode with Lucasfilm Games. On Steam the standard edition is 59.99 EUR, the Deluxe 79.99 EUR. You race landspeeders, speeder bikes and skim speeders across a multi-planet tournament, with podracers thrown in for specific events. Jakku, Ando Prime and a handful of other planets each come with a small third-person hub where you repair parts, buy abilities, upgrade your ride and chat to the locals.

How it actually plays

The handling is the star. Every class feels distinct: landspeeders are the forgiving all-rounders, bikes can stop on a dime and burst forward, skim speeders turn on a knife's edge and reward people who treat drifting as a religion. Boost management, battery capacity and afterburner tuning all matter, and the parts system is deep without becoming a spreadsheet. By the second act I had a build around corrosion vents and lock-on ion blasts that turned every race into a demolition derby, and it felt like my own creation rather than a preset.

The campaign is run-based. You enter a league, race through planets in acts of four or five events, and if you fail objectives too often you lose your entry and start the series over. On paper that sounds like a racer with a Hades complex. In practice it mostly works, because builds carry forward in spirit even if your progress doesn't, and the race variety - point-to-point, laps, elimination, time trials, mystery events - keeps the repeats from feeling like reruns.

The highs

It is one of the best-looking arcade racers I've played. Speed sense is enormous without ever becoming unreadable, the Star Wars sound design does half the work, and the hubs give the galaxy a texture most licensed games skip. Multiplayer supports 12-player tours across five planets with crossplay, plus quick races and a separate podracing tour. It ran without a single crash for me on PC.

The lows

There is no minimap. On tracks you've seen twice, fine. On a new planet at full boost, I lost races to a blind fork more than once, and that's not difficulty, that's a missing UI element. The mandatory podracer events are tuned so much faster and more fragile than everything else that they feel bolted on from a different game - and because they sit inside the roguelite structure, one bad podrace can cost you an entire series. The opening hours also explain almost nothing; expect to learn the parts economy by losing.

Who it's for

If you miss Burnout, Wipeout or the PS2 era of arcade racers, buy it. If you want a comfortable Star Wars kart game for the kids, this is too demanding and too punishing. And check prices before you choose a platform: the PlayStation Store listing has been noticeably more expensive than Steam and Xbox in some markets in our region.

Verdict

Galactic Racer is a real racing game wearing a Star Wars costume, not the other way round. A minimap and a gentler hand with the podracers would have made it a classic.

Score: 8/10

Image: Wikideas1 / CC0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sebulba_podracer.webp