SWGR

Star Wars: Galactic Racer - Review

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 15:07:47 +0000

For most Star Wars fans, racing begins and ends with Anakin’s famed battle against Sebulba to win his freedom—though if you want to buy cheap PS5 games and experience that podracing thrill yourself, you’ll have to look beyond the films. Behind the scenes – and buried in Star Wars canon – is a robust backstory of all the racing legends who comprise the Galactic League racing scene. If you’re down this Jakku-centric well, prepare to be wowed at the fantastic homage to these galaxy-wide speed demons. You will interact and then some with each of these characters throughout. Disclaimer: I love Star Wars, but I’m not schooled on every rabbit hole this beloved universe can go down. Thus, I’ll deliberately avoid excessive references to canonical aspects as I’m certain I’ll miss something along the way. I don’t want to offend any Master, Padawan, or Sith. Star Wars Galactic Racer is an incredibly robust title, featuring a deep campaign mode, online multiplayer, an expansive arcade option, and smaller single-planet campaigns featuring named racers and their signature vehicles. Campaign mode is where the magic truly happens. In roguelite fashion, a campaign is stretched across four worlds with multiple race branch options. These include traditional racing, time trials, mystery encounters, and elimination (where failing to end in the top three ends your run entirely). I appreciate that Galactic Racer doesn’t punish you for poor finishes in traditional race types or failing to complete time trials or similar test vehicle runs. The punishment occurs via low rewards, which leave a campaign vehicle woefully underpowered for the big finish.

Roguelite Risk-Reward Dynamics

Like any good roguelite, mystery branch options come with omnipresent risk-reward dynamics—much like trying to buy cheap PS4 games, where the lure of a bargain often comes with its own hidden costs and unpredictable payoffs. I once opted to move some money in exchange for better bonuses, only to be caught later in the path by the big bad jackass and have to pay up way more than I would’ve earned. Earlier campaigns culminate in a 1v1 versus Sebulba to qualify for the proper Galactic League Racing Series. Sebulba is no slouch, and he will use every trick in the book to ensure you fail many times over. On that note, Galactic Racer is a very tough game, perhaps the hardest racer I’ve ever played. The AI is merciless and tactful, and it will frequently maximize terrain and exploit your mistakes. With this being said, the game never outright cheats. Mistakes you make will be your own, and when taking out other racers, Galactic Racer will always leave you in a position to recover from said maneuver. This stuff, as is the way of Roguelites, is both dizzyingly complex and utterly simple. Parts, Racer Styles, Favours — they're all good things that might happen to you. And out on the track there are bad things waiting too. If you take damage and fumble the recovery, you lose a part and have to run without that 25 percent boost, say, until you patch it up between planets. Maybe you fall out with a rival in a story encounter and then the next race — there's this wonderful bit where you tap codes to bring each system online early, feels just like flicking overhead switches in an X-Wing — and instead of zipping off, you just explode. You just explode.

Galactic Racer Balances Racing and Loot

Luckily, Galactic Racer never forgets that between the loot and the loadout and the story choices, this is still a racing game. And with that we're back to Burnout — and back to Star Wars, somehow. The game has that ceaseless full-ahead pelt, each corner a set-piece even before you tip your Skim Speeder onto one edge. But different planets don't just have their own looks, they have their own impacts. Icy worlds keep your Ramjet cooler and longer-lasting. Toxic worlds corrode you if you linger too long over lakes of lurid acid. Desert worlds bake you until leaving the Ramjet off feels like the smarter play. Your call. These worlds don't just look beautiful — from Jakku's dunes and wrecked Star Destroyers you thread between, to Crait's white crystalline surface with red dust billowing underneath. They're also carved into fascinating tracks that blend tight underground corridors, where cornering is a constant discussion with death, and daringly wide-open outside sections where I once got so turned around I ended up going backwards. Places that keep shifting how they challenge you. And I suspect better racers than me will spend an awfully long time working out the optimal strategies for each one.

Star Wars Easter Eggs in Racing Game

All of that and it's Star Wars, down to the Droids drifting past in the on-foot sections between races, where you visit the shop and chat to rivals, down to the glimpse of a very familiar targeting computer on the dashboard of a craft I just unlocked. Down even to the wonderful array of English regional accents that suggest dayplayers doing their bits at Elstree Studios. And it's also a lovely suite of racing options — arcade modes, themed mini-tours, multiplayer one-offs, multiplayer micro-campaigns, even a little Pod Racing thrown in. It's new games, with Roguelite choices and endless unlockables, and it's also old games, with cruel and ingenious courses where everything can be lost in an instant. It's a Galaxy Far, Far Away, and it's also Paradise City.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer - Review

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 15:06:45 +0000

A dozen little similarities followed over those first races, buy cheap PS5 games. That crash cam, when you knock someone else off the road, still swoops backwards to catch the tumbling wreckage and then rushes forward to catch up with you as it did in Burnout 3. There may be no wheels involved, but there's still a grippy sense (if slightly diminished, as is, just slightly, the sense of weight) that pulls you to the ground and seems to hold you there, the center of gravity in the very middle of your speeding machine. Takedowns are still called Takedowns! Boost indulged at the right moment can still change everything. You are still encouraged – and I will put this delicately – to drive like a deeply mean-spirited son of a bitch. This is not a game for polite daytime racers. It wants you to grit your teeth so hard that they start to turn to dust. Because that is what it takes. All of this is a wonderful basis for a Star Wars game, it turns out, and this is where we actually get to the Galaxy Far Far Away. Burnout slots into this universe so well because the take on Star Wars that Fuse is pursuing is the junky/formidable technology side, the side where things rattle and hiss and smell faintly of burnt wiring. Forget Jedis and wookies and midiclorians, a word I am only slightly surprised to discover that Google cannot autocorrect, so knock yourself out. Forget all that stuff. This is the Star Wars of the Millennium Falcon, which needs to be thumped just so before its engines start, and which is a thing of switches and buttons and which shudders dangerously when it drops out of hyperspace. It's the Star Wars of landcraft that's fast as heck but rusty and looks like the back panel of a refrigerator. It's the Star Wars of malfunctioning droids that shower sparks and squeal and are always ready to throw off loose parts. And you can almost feel the grit of it under your fingernails.

Boost or Risk Death

Now, is it about buying cheap games to boost your collection—or to boost in a way that might kill you? And it's all channeled through the experience of driving these wonderfully clanky metal beasts around at high speeds. Two boosts suggests a layer of strategy to the racing, and it's here we probably need to get at the game's main conceit. I've delayed it a little, but in truth, I spent a pleasant hour enjoying this return to Burnout-land without noticing it myself. Anyway: Galactic Racer's campaign is a Roguelite. And even this is all about the tech. You pick between one of three craft types, from dependable Landspeeders to darting, bad-at-corners, Speederbikes and Skim Speeders, the royalty of the race track that can turn on their sides for extra manoeuvrability but also come with a bit of a learning curve. Pick one of these guys and then you're off into a series of races split across a series of acts but also a series of planets. You make decisions on what event to select next via one of those FTL-style branching path maps that are everywhere these days. Because that's just how games are structured now.

Gameplay Variety and Replayability

Into this structure, the game pours an awful lot of stuff, more than enough to make each run feel unique. You're racing against a set cast of other racers, but your relationships with them may change from one playthrough to the next depending on whether you make deals with them, swap parts with them or develop rivalries. But more importantly there's the stuff you do to your craft. Each race leaves you with cash to buy new parts, as well as core upgrades to your machine's basic stats, and perhaps even new abilities that work a little like the kinds of things you might get in Mario Kart. Maybe you want mines to drop on the field. Maybe you want a burst of auto pilot. Maybe you want to do something nasty to others when you crash. Simple as that.

Conclusion

The best way to talk about the interaction of all of this stuff – parts and abilities and upgrades – is to tell you that in my last run, I put all my points into two stats: one measuring how robust my craft was when it came to running into walls, and another that measured how much Afterburner I had. I ignored everything else – my Ramjet, my cornering abilities, all that crucial jazz. And I did this because I was picking parts that extended my Afterburner and also extended how fast it recharged. And then I doubled down on abilities that granted me autopilot. By the time I had reached the final races, I was almost always boosting, and I was simultaneously almost never doing any actual steering. I had hacked together a deeply unwise build and I was utterly committed to it. Add to all this Racer Styles that foreground different approaches and Favours, which act as selectable load-outs of perks, and you have a Roguelite with a surprising range of variables. Don't take what I've just said above and mark this down as the game where you can just rely on autopilot, by the bye. You can play through the game for hours without touching autopilot.

Star Wars: Galactic Racer - Review

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:59:48 +0000

The story and characters are also excellent, and if you're looking to buy cheap PS5 games, this is one title worth checking out. 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. Because it gives you a reason to keep coming back. The head-to-head online racing is where the game really shines, though. You can choose quick races or a multiplayer tour, and the multiplayer tour puts 12 racers through a 5-planet series that ends in a championship grand prix, and throughout this tour you will upgrade your speeder exactly as you do in the campaign, and 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. And you feel that rivalry in your gut. It is the choices we make. It is the choices that define us.

Impressions

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is everything I hoped it would be buy cheap games and see for yourself. 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. Or at least, that's what it felt like. A few years back I got to ask Alex Ward, co-founder of Criterion, about the driving model in Burnout. A friend told me there was real physics under all that arcade noise. Physics of strange nuance and beauty. I was reverent asking him, even if I sounded a bit lost – is it a driving model or a handling model or a physics model? – and Ward, bless him, was having none of it. He said in the very early Burnout games the cars didn't even have wheels. How's that for nuance.

SWRG

Star Wars: Galactic Racer then, with its landspeeders and podracers, all of them ghosting over the dirt on some blurry antigrav cushion, feels like coming home. Ward may not be involved, but Fuse Games, the developer, has an awful lot of Criterion DNA coiled up inside it, and you can feel it in your hands, in the way the vehicles lean and drift. If you're like me, and you've come to accept over the years that Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise are together the most thrilling video games ever made, that's a good thing. But even if you know nothing about Burnout, you're going to have a very pleasant time here.

Burnout vs Star Wars Galactic Racer

I'm starting with Burnout rather than Star Wars because I feel like Galactic Racer does that too. Sure there's some lovely faux-Williams music to kick us off, twinkly and intriguing out in space, martial and brooding down on the planets, and we're wedged somewhere in the timeline between Episode 6 and Episode 7. There are droids and desert planets and fish-headed aliens. But the game came alive for me in my first race, on my first corner, when I realised that if I was playing Burnout I would press a particular face button right about now to ignite boost for the first time. Purely running on muscle memory I pushed the button while the thought was occurring to me. And I got the same boost. The same feeling. I was jolted back in my chair. Speed, yes, but the horizon seemed to broaden and shimmer. I was home.