Star Wars: Galactic Racer Review

Near the end of my last run in Star Wars: Galactic Racer, I had the chance to pay off Kestar Bool. The league’s nepo-baby owner/star racer claimed that I owed him 3,000 credits for scratching his speeder. I had the money, but instead of giving him anything, I called him a nepo baby. This enraged Kestar, and he stormed off while making vague threats. At the start of the next race, however, those threats were a lot less vague when my ship exploded like something out of The Godfather the second I attempted to accelerate. 

Developer Fuse Games filled Galactic Racer – its spiritual successor to Episode I Racer – with moments like my run-in with Kestar Bool. And this is just one reason why Galactic Racer has one of my favorite single-player campaigns in any racing game ever. 

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a rogue-lite. Fuse prefers to call it “runs-based” probably because they know “rogue” causes a certain percentage of the audience to shut down and walk away. But that would be silly here because the structure of this game is brilliant. 

In any racing game, you tend to return to the same tracks repeatedly. That’s just the nature of the genre. What Fuse did here is lean into that aspect while spicing up the progression with a lot of familiar rogue-lite flavoring. 

You race across a handful of biomes. As you race, you earn a variety of buffs (and debuffs) and other improvements to your build. Those come in the form of upgrades to your vehicle stats, parts with specific perks, and abilities that you can activate during a race. As you travel from node to node across the league planets, you might also encounter characters that will give you other abilities or you might unlock new racer styles. 

The progression is nonstop, and it does its job. And that job is to give you a lot to play with while you do the most important thing in a game like this: learn the tracks. 

The benefit of a run-based game is that the designers can give you a lot of rewards that can both improve your performance and act as a carrot on a stick. And all the while, you are improving as a player. It’s a virtuous cycle, and Fuse deploys it expertly in Galactic Racer. 

I noticed that expertise when I was about halfway through the campaign for the first time. At that point, I had cleared the easier, early-game races but I also didn’t have the stats to compete for the lead. This led to a few runs where I was battling for a strong finish in the midfield. To me, this is the test of a racing game: am I still having fun and feeling a sense of progression when I’m not winning every (or even any) races? The midfield battles delivered on that. 

Beyond the structure, the racing itself is exquisite. The sense of speed is astounding even when you are slower at the beginning of the campaign. By the time you hit the ludicrous speeds later in the game, your brain will have trouble keeping up.

But the real joy of racing in Galactic Racer is the feeling of control. 

In our world, racers have this concept of riding on the edge – keeping a vehicle on the absolute limit of its ability to stay on the road. Galactic Racer captures that feeling in every race. 

This is not an arcade racer where you’ll get away with never using the brake. You’re going to need to use the brake, your afterburner boost, your ramjet boost, the landspeeder’s drift, the speed bike’s kinetic burst, your venting ability, and countless other tools to manage every turn and overtake. At times throughout the game, I noticed just how much my hands were doing to avoid crashing into a wall while racing at 800 miles per hour (it’s probably kilometers per hour, but what the hell is a kilometer?). This feeling of managing every fraction of a second to maintain top speed “on the edge” is the key to a great racer – and Galactic Racer crushes it.

Between the structure and the feel, Galactic Racer quickly passed my bar for delivering on a modern racer. It doesn’t hurt that everything else turns it into a fantastic complete package.

Visually, the game sings. Worlds are detailed and particle effects like kicking up salt on Crait (from Star Wars – Episode VIII: The Last Jedi) are gorgeous. Occasionally, the tracks are so detailed that you might struggle to see where the next turn is, but this is something that lessened for me over time. I had to learn the tracks – and I had to learn how to escape danger through strong braking and a willingness to let off the boosts. 

The story and characters are also excellent. I wasn’t expecting to care about any of the characters, but by the end, I was invested in many of them. I was certainly determined to take out Kestar Bool and found the arc of that main narrative very satisfying. 

But maybe the thing that pushed me over the edge from loving Galactic Racer to considering it one of the best entries in the genre is the multiplayer. First, you have a robust Arcade mode that is a series of challenges where you can set times on a leaderboard. I love that stuff. 

The head-to-head online racing is where the game really shines, though. You can choose quick races or a multiplayer tour. The multiplayer tour puts 12 racers through a 5-planet series that ends in a championship grand prix. Throughout this tour, you will upgrade your speeder exactly as you do in the campaign (but in a more compressed, rapid format). 

By playing against the same people for a series of races, you get a lot of opportunities for drama. The game asks you to pick a rival and to bet on where you will finish, and that means people have incentives to take you out. So it was common to see two or three pilots ramming each other and exploding around every turn – or for your main rival to jump over your head and try to take you out by cutting you off from above. 

I cannot wait for the game to launch so I can hop online and play with friends and strangers. 

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is everything I hoped it would be. Fuse built a campaign that keeps giving me reasons to master the tracks, then made the racing feel good enough that I wanted to. 

And for my fellow Episode I Racer lovers: Galactic Racer’s marketing has kept the podracers in the background, but don’t let that fool you. By the time I was done with the campaign, I found myself happy and whispering one thing to myself: Now this is podracing.