It pains me to say it, but Star Wars’ cultural staying power has taken a massive blow in recent years – and for pretty good reason. Most of the Disney Plus shows have flopped, and the franchise’s return to cinema, The Mandalorian and Grogu, performed worse than any other theatrical release in the series’ history. Despite my lifelong fandom, I cast my eye upon the current state of the sci-fi space opera and feel a sense of apathy.
But Star Wars video games have remained consistently impressive in recent years – the Soulslike Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor duology and the turn-based Star Wars Zero Company were engaging entries in the canon, prioritizing fun gameplay over anything else.
Developer Fuse Games has continued this string of bangers across wildly different genres with Star Wars: Galactic Racer, an arcade-y game with speedy ships, plenty of underhanded action and a refreshingly self-contained story. It’s F-Zero meets Burnout, and it’s one of my new favorite racing games.
A classic underdog sports story with Star Wars set dressing
From the outset, I was uncertain if a plotline about a Star Wars racing league would remain narratively engaging over the course of an entire game — its spiritual predecessor, the 1999 podracing classic Star Wars Episode 1: Racer, didn’t bother with one. Once I found out Star Wars: Galactic Racer takes place between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, I was even more skeptical – the sequel timeline hasn’t been an era for consistently engaging stories, after all.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, to discover that Galactic Racer tells a mostly novel story about a small corner of the universe coming to terms with a new normal after the downfall of the Galactic Empire. As it turns out, there’s not much time to engage with speeder racing when entire worlds are buckling under the tyranny of space fascism, so everything has to be put together again from the ground up.
Racing promoter Darius Pax has a passion for high-speed sports, and he’s wrangling sponsors for a new league by pulling in some of the best talent from across the galaxy. That includes shady characters like ex-TIE Fighter pilot Griff Halloran and kindhearted thrillseekers like old Soren Zaks. The most talented racer is nepo baby Kestar Bool, who is using his family’s riches to fund top-tier racing machines and initiate a hostile takeover of Pax’s assets.
To stave off the imminent threat of Bool seizing the league, Pax enlists the help of main character Shade and their happy-go-lucky mechanic Hibi to win the league championship and keep the sport pure. Shade has a devil-may-care attitude and a mysterious vendetta against the egoistic antagonist, so they’re happy enough to sign on to the competition.
The setup is your classic sports underdog story where you’re looking to score petty vengeance against your sneering opponent. There’s no high-stakes galaxy-level threat – this is a story about outperforming one bad guy on the most dangerous racetracks in the universe, and it rules.
Fuse Games describes the campaign structure as “runs-based,” which essentially means it plays out like many other roguelikes, where random rewards build up your kit as you progress up a procedurally generated tournament bracket. I’m not entirely sold on the integration of this concept for an arcade racer, but I appreciate how crashing out and losing too many events essentially scraps your vehicle and causes Shade and Hibi to begin anew. Shade is supposed to be a scrappy upstart, so losing your parts and upgrades and needing to retune the whole racing kit feels like it serves a narrative purpose.
Galactic Racer does indulge in a little bit of nostalgia – Anakin’s podracing rival, Sebulba, appears as a washed-up legend, while the antagonistic Bool family apparently built a large chunk of its wealth running part of the empire’s slave trade. There are plenty of cameos and one-off dialogue lines that will tickle lore nerds pink.
Still, there’s more restraint in this game’s storytelling than in most Star Wars projects, and the narrative is better off for it. I think fans want to explore new corners of the galaxy rather than follow the same handful of bloodlines – I know I do – and Galactic Racer debuts plenty of fun characters that don’t connect to high-stakes galaxy-ending plotlines.
The seedy underbelly of the Star Wars universe is perhaps the space opera at its most entertaining, even if that wretched hive of scum and villainy is largely composed of comically evil mobsters and smugglers. It’s great fun to explore that side of the sci-fi world without forcibly including a legacy character like Han Solo or Boba Fett.
Scrappy, speedy and strategic playstyles are equally
There’s a surprising amount of depth to Galactic Racer’s build system. Before you even start a run, you need to decide whether you’re flying a versatile landspeeder, risky speeder bike or graceful skim speeder – each vehicle has different acceleration speeds, turning rates and drifting capabilities.
You’ll start a campaign tournament with mostly stock equipment, but each race won provides credits and upgrades that will help you prepare for the knockout championship event. Different parts provide passive bonuses on the track, and active abilities let you expend the vehicle’s energy at key moments to score advantages in a race.
As with any roguelike, I found a build type that worked for me: I routinely invest in my speeder’s afterburners and its volatile ramjet engine, picking up parts that permit boosting in the dangerous redline zone for longer before worrying about blowing up my craft. There’s still an appreciable level of friction that forces players to make hard decisions – you’re not guaranteed to find parts or abilities you like to use, and crashing or corroding your ship during races can do damage that carries debuffs over to the next event.
More kinetic abilities that encourage brawls with other racers are probably going to be fan favorites, because Galactic Racer has a sickly satisfying takedown system ripped straight out of the old Burnout games. Brushing up against other speeders and watching the sparks fly feels intense, and slamming into an opponent will reward you with a crash cam as they go careening off the track. This type of carnage may not win every run, but building a resilient chassis or dropping bombs to cause mayhem is absolutely cathartic.
That’s not to say that I’m completely in love with every ability you can pick up in the game. The addition of an autopilot is particularly silly to me, especially since drifting around sharp turns and racing clean lines feels gratifying. Worse, while it might buy a couple of seconds to activate traps or fix malfunctioning parts, the ability could just as easily betray you by ending right before you speed directly into a wall. It just isn’t particularly well-implemented – but that’s one of the exceedingly few balancing missteps I discovered.
Lots of thought was put into the roguelike structure of Galactic Racer, and it feels like there’s arunning clean lines or using underhanded tactics to force opponents off the track
This arcade racer can go the distance
There’s plenty of content for budding racers to take on once they’ve taken Kestar Bool down a few pegs in Galactic Racer’s story mode. The game features arcade time trials, multiplayer races, podracing events and more cosmetic rewards than you can shake a rathtar tentacle at. These are genuinely challenging races that could take hours to score a gold medal on, and I started to feel like a bit of a masochist after half a dozen attempts to master the ramjet-themed arcade event.
A notable pain point is the lack of an AI quick race – it seems like a massive oversight that there’s no mode where you can hop on, pick a track and difficulty and duke it out in a single match against some bots. This is something that I hope gets rectified soon.
A few flaws notwithstanding, it’s obvious that the development team at Fuse Games has an earnest love for this storied universe, and it shows through plenty of little tidbits and extra flourishes that flesh out the gameplay experience. Runs build into their own diegetic narratives as players crash out opponents and form rivalries that last throughout multiple races.
Characters react to your skill (or lack thereof), challenging Shade to one-on-one knockout races and proposing lucrative sidebets before each event. It makes sense that any headstrong individual willing to strap themselves into a speeder bike and speed through the wreckage of a downed Star Destroyer would arrogantly put their money where their mouth is, and it makes the world feel alive.
Many of those elements carry over to the multiplayer tours, where players are able to gamble among themselves with credits earned in previous races – I can foresee this potentially getting a tad toxic in a public lobby, but in my experience, it was a great way for emergent narratives to form and made the mode feel all the more meaningful.
I can’t imagine this game will make many critics’ GOTY lists, especially when so many blockbuster projects have already been released. But Star Wars: Galactic Racer is easily one of my favorite games of 2026 – and not just because its gameplay loop had me inadvertently staying up for “one more run” at 3 a.m.
Among its many virtues, the game reminded me that there’s still value in a galaxy far, far away. Over breakneck races and loving details, my apathy for the series melted away, returning a childlike spark of awe and wonder for this sci-fi universe. I doubt a game like this will dictate the future creative direction of a juggernaut franchise like Star Wars, but Galactic Racer is surely something special for anyone who wants to ride their ramjet from Crait to Tatooine.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is set to be released for PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S on Tuesday.
