Star Wars: Galactic Racer

The setting is the smart play: the New Republic Era, just after Return of the Jedi, in a galaxy rebuilding itself. The developers drew on real history — the post-war boom in racing as ex-military pilots went looking for speed — and populated it with faces from every era: Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros, the Boonta Eve Classic course, the starship-strewn deserts of Jakku, and Griff Halloran, the ex-TIE pilot from Star Wars Resistance still wearing his battered armor. It is a spiritual successor to the podracing games of the ’90s and early 2000s, modernized into a runs-based arcade racer.

The studio behind it is the story within the story. Fuse Games was founded in 2023 by former Criterion leads — the people who made Burnout’s takedowns and Need for Speed’s night races feel the way they do — and this is their debut. That pedigree shows in the handling: this is anti-gravity racing with weight, drift physics you can feel in your thumbs, and crashes that make you flinch. Lucasfilm Games handing Star Wars racing to the Burnout crew was the right call the way it was the obvious call.

Under the hood: Unreal Engine 5, upgrade packs and credits earned race by race, and the return of the legendary Podracer class — immense speed, immense strategy. Three repulsorcraft styles to build around, each with its own advanced cornering technique: the landspeeder, the stable all-rounder, drifts with a heavy, deliberate slide that demands you let go a split second before instinct says to; the speeder bike, which accelerates hard, brakes into tight turns, then fires the stored energy back out as a Kinetic Burst; and the skim speeder, which holds momentum by rolling 90 degrees onto a Knife Edge through sweepers. The campaign’s roguelite spine — a rarity in racing games, and the thing that has reviewers most excited — turns the single-player tour into a runs-based gauntlet: every race feeds the next build, every choice shapes your prospects in the League, and the loop of building for the best run works just as well in the 12-player cross-platform multiplayer.

The early verdicts are in, and they’re glowing. The Drive gave it 9/10, calling it “a thrilling and gorgeous anti-gravity arcade racer with a polished, if unforgiving career mode that feels totally refreshing for the genre.” Reviewers keep landing on the same word: dangerous. This makes racing feel genuinely dangerous again — blistering speed, brutal crashes, constant risk-versus-reward decisions, one of the most exhilarating racers in years. The caveats are honest ones: the chaos can make victory and defeat feel frustratingly outside your control, and one reviewer’s only real complaint was the way Shade walks in the pre-race camp segments. (Fuse could patch that.)

The story punches above racing-game weight. Kestar Bool is the perfectly smug son of immense wealth and the League’s reigning champion, increasingly taking the circuit over with money and influence; League founder Darius Pax answers by bringing in Shade — your nearly personality-free racer — to dethrone him and settle an old score. Three acts, a couple of genuine twists, a plot that makes absolutely no sense, and a cast of rival racers who get just enough screen time to show personality — plus a genuinely brilliant use of a minor Star Wars character that fans will clock immediately. By racing-game standards it’s great, and it’s leagues ahead of the genre’s usual cardboard cutouts.

The details: $59.99 Standard, $79.99 Deluxe with three exclusive vehicles, unique liveries, three arcade events, a deluxe player banner, and a digital art book; pre-orders add exclusive liveries and banners. Single-player campaign plus 12-player online multiplayer with cross-platform play, 60fps, 4K, HDR, and PS5 Pro Enhanced support. Reviews landed this week, and the green flag drops Tuesday, October 6 — three days out. No Force. No prophecy. Just skill, strategy, and the will to rise.

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