Star Wars: Galactic Racer Review
Oct 13, 2026 · 7 min · 8 segments
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- Speakers
- Tony JacksonHost
- Show signals
- SuitabilitySafeBiasNot politicalAudience≈20M followers
Oct 13, 2026 · 7 min · 8 segments
Roger, Roger ramjet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
For a series as storied as Star Wars, one brimming with more spacecraft and speeders than George Lucas has beard bristles, it borders on baffling that developer Fuse Games' Star Wars Galactic Racer can arrive in 2026 as the first new game of its kind in over two decades.
I blame Super Bombad Racing, if only because Gungan isn't a real language, and using a portmanteau of bomb and bad in the title was probably never the perfect pathway to sales success.
Galactic Racer, on the other hand, has a range of impressively customizable vehicle classes that expands the hangar well beyond classic pod racers, gorgeous course design, and an impressively credible and explorable world outside the on-track action.
It's an eye-catching and rich resurrection of Star Wars racing that's as fast as it can be surprisingly unforgiving.
Galactic Racer's main hook is its run-based roguelite-inspired campaign, which comes with a strict philosophy of no mid-race restarts.
It is an interesting and genuinely fresh approach that bakes a very real and logical feeling of risk and danger into the action, a feeling that is admittedly absent in racing games with any sort of rewind functionality or unlimited restarts.
Yes, you can still pause, and yes, you can still save and come back later, but you otherwise need to live with the consequences of what happens out on the track.
It's a structure that makes the racing tense and meaningful, even if racing over the same landscapes over and over does grow repetitive.
As the mysterious and faceless human racer called Shade, our ultimate goal is to beat the Galactic Racing League's moaning, arrogant, and entitled heel Kestar Bull in the final head-to-head race.
In simple terms, building and piloting a quick one requires a combination of general stat upgrades, performance parts, and various additional perks, from gadgets that can be activated during races to specific bonuses granted to you by allies you accumulate over the course of the story.
These are rationed out randomly or earned as we progress and re-progress through the championship tours.
Tours unfold over three and later five planets before culminating in a final knockout event.
This is quite elegantly and thoughtfully implemented, thanks to the racing paddock at each event you can fully explore in third person.
Not only does this build an authentic world around the Galactic Racing League, which in turn crafts a world I feel like I'm inhabiting rather than just shuffling through menu screens, it lets Fuse Games fill it with characters that can acknowledge your previous failures as you return for another crack at the title.
However, Galactic Racer's core weakness is that it unfortunately doesn't feature enough planets to avoid feeling overly repetitive.
While I'm conscious a roguelite structure brings with it an expectation of a certain level of repetition, it does become fairly tedious slogging through its small list of repeating planets over successive attempts.
The specific circuits used, the order of event types, and how they branch over the span of a championship are shuffled from tour to tour.
Having a couple more planets that could have been swapped in and out would have gone a long way in reducing the fatigue that quickly sets in after several runs through the same locations.
Star Wars Galactic Racer is a fabulous-looking and frantically fast anti-grav racer that impressively goes further than just taking the decades-old Star Wars racer games and giving them a 4K facelift.
With a range of satisfyingly customizable vehicle classes beyond pod racers, a world outside the racing you can soak in and explore in third person, and an interesting roguelite-adjacent structure that injects a considerable degree of risk into the action, Galactic Racer is a fresh and accomplished blend of Lucas lore with the destructive spirit of arcade racing icons like Burnout and Motorstorm.
Its run-based campaign can grow unavoidably tedious over long stints because of its heavy reliance on repeatedly revisiting the same slim selection of planets, and its lack of split-screen is disappointing considering its roots run back to consoles regarded as the kings of same-couch chaos.
For a series as storied as Star Wars, one brimming with more spacecraft and speeders than George Lucas has beard bristles, it borders on baffling that developer Fuse Games' Star Wars Galactic Racer can arrive in 2026 as the first new game of its kind in over two decades.
I blame Super Bombad Racing, if only because Gungan isn't a real language, and using a portmanteau of bomb and bad in the title was probably never the perfect pathway to sales success.
Galactic Racer, on the other hand, has a range of impressively customizable vehicle classes that expands the hangar well beyond classic pod racers, gorgeous course design, and an impressively credible and explorable world outside the on-track action.
It's an eye-catching and rich resurrection of Star Wars racing that's as fast as it can be surprisingly unforgiving.
Galactic Racer's main hook is its run-based roguelite-inspired campaign, which comes with a strict philosophy of no mid-race restarts.
It is an interesting and genuinely fresh approach that bakes a very real and logical feeling of risk and danger into the action, a feeling that is admittedly absent in racing games with any sort of rewind functionality or unlimited restarts.
Yes, you can still pause, and yes, you can still save and come back later, but you otherwise need to live with the consequences of what happens out on the track.
It's a structure that makes the racing tense and meaningful, even if racing over the same landscapes over and over does grow repetitive.
As the mysterious and faceless human racer called Shade, our ultimate goal is to beat the Galactic Racing League's moaning, arrogant, and entitled heel Kestar Bull in the final head-to-head race.
In simple terms, building and piloting a quick one requires a combination of general stat upgrades, performance parts, and various additional perks, from gadgets that can be activated during races to specific bonuses granted to you by allies you accumulate over the course of the story.
These are rationed out randomly or earned as we progress and re-progress through the championship tours.
Tours unfold over three and later five planets before culminating in a final knockout event.
This is quite elegantly and thoughtfully implemented, thanks to the racing paddock at each event you can fully explore in third person.
Not only does this build an authentic world around the Galactic Racing League, which in turn crafts a world I feel like I'm inhabiting rather than just shuffling through menu screens, it lets Fuse Games fill it with characters that can acknowledge your previous failures as you return for another crack at the title.
However, Galactic Racer's core weakness is that it unfortunately doesn't feature enough planets to avoid feeling overly repetitive.
While I'm conscious a roguelite structure brings with it an expectation of a certain level of repetition, it does become fairly tedious slogging through its small list of repeating planets over successive attempts.
The specific circuits used, the order of event types, and how they branch over the span of a championship are shuffled from tour to tour.
Having a couple more planets that could have been swapped in and out would have gone a long way in reducing the fatigue that quickly sets in after several runs through the same locations.
Star Wars Galactic Racer is a fabulous-looking and frantically fast anti-grav racer that impressively goes further than just taking the decades-old Star Wars racer games and giving them a 4K facelift.
With a range of satisfyingly customizable vehicle classes beyond pod racers, a world outside the racing you can soak in and explore in third person, and an interesting roguelite-adjacent structure that injects a considerable degree of risk into the action, Galactic Racer is a fresh and accomplished blend of Lucas lore with the destructive spirit of arcade racing icons like Burnout and Motorstorm.
Its run-based campaign can grow unavoidably tedious over long stints because of its heavy reliance on repeatedly revisiting the same slim selection of planets, and its lack of split-screen is disappointing considering its roots run back to consoles regarded as the kings of same-couch chaos.
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