It has taken the galaxy far, far away the best part of a quarter of a century to come up with a proper sequel to Star Wars Episode I: Racer. That 1999 game took the one sequence in The Phantom Menace that nearly everyone agreed was brilliant and turned it into one of the best-selling sci-fi racers ever made. Next Tuesday, 6 October, Star Wars: Galactic Racer finally hits the grid on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, via Steam and the Epic Games Store. And the people holding the starting flag are exactly the ones you would pick if you wanted something to crash spectacularly into a canyon wall.
The developer is Fuse Games, a studio founded in 2023 by senior veterans of Criterion Games, the people behind Burnout and a fair chunk of Need for Speed. The game is published by Secret Mode in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. Studio boss Matt Webster has worked on Star Wars games before, back in his Criterion days. This time the brief is pure Burnout. You don’t just overtake your rivals. You slam, shunt and take them down, preferably into something hard and expensive. Darth Vader would surely have approved, had he not been strictly a TIE fighter man.
The setting is the lawless Outer Rim after the fall of the Empire. While the New Republic struggles to rebuild, syndicates are bankrolling an unsanctioned racing circuit called the Galactic League, which is precisely the sort of thing that flourishes when the government is too busy filling in forms to notice. You play Shade, a lone pilot with a taste for revenge and glory, who is out to topple the reigning champion, Kestar Bool. The tagline is “No Force. No prophecy.” Translated from Lucasfilm, that means nobody gets to win by closing their eyes and listening to a dead mentor. It’s just you, your reflexes and an engine that sounds like it badly wants to explode.
There are four classes of repulsorcraft to bolt together and customise: landspeeders, speeder bikes, skim speeders and, inevitably, podracers. The tracks take in Tatooine, Jakku, Ando Prime, Lantaana and Sentinel I, plus Derven Acos, a purpose-built League arena that packs in every planetary condition on the tour. Old faces are turning up in the paddock. Sebulba is back, presumably still cheating, and so is Ben Quadinaros, whose podracer famously fell to pieces on the start line in the film. If the Galactic League has a fan club, he is surely its honorary president.
The cleverest twist is structural. The single-player campaign is runs-based and borrows from roguelites, with procedurally generated content meant to make each run up the League ladder play out differently. Alongside it sit Scenario and Arcade modes and twelve-player online races. Fuse’s boss has pitched it as a premium release with the campaign, arcade and multiplayer all in the box, rather than a season pass in a speeder’s clothing. The music is by Gordy Haab, who has scored several Star Wars games already, so the John Williams-flavoured brass section should be in safe hands. PC players should note that the game ships with Denuvo anti-tamper, after a brief period of confusion when mentions of it vanished from the Steam page.
The early signs are encouraging. Hands-on previews from Summer Game Fest, including IGN, Push Square and Polygon, found the Burnout DNA very much intact, and found that the roguelite structure supports the racing rather than smothering it. If Fuse can deliver on that next week, Star Wars may finally have its first great racing game since the days when Jar Jar Binks was considered a sensible idea. And this time there’s no slow bit with a midi-chlorian count to sit through before the race starts.
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