Galactic Racer is the best Star Wars game in years

After 15 hours with the campaign mode in Star Wars: Galactic Racer, I’ve got a new game-of-the-year frontrunner by a wide margin. In fact, I’d say Galactic Racer is straight-up the best Star Wars game without “Old Republic” in the title. It has the focused design sense of something like 2020’s Squadrons, all the heart and humor of George Lucas’s best work, and the irresistible pacing of the Episode I podracer sequence.

Galactic Racer marries the structure and handcrafted feel of an indie roguelike to the power and spectacle of an Unreal Engine 5 blockbuster, with some truly unique results. Like Slay the Spire or Hades, you begin each run by choosing a playstyle for your racer and then build on it as you progress further through the campaign, making incremental upgrades to your vehicle’s attributes, purchasing abilities and parts, and managing limited resources. Individual races flash by at adrenaline-pumping speed, relying on instinct and a command of your build. But ultimate success—getting into the Galactic League and becoming a legend of the sport—requires careful decisionmaking in the quiet moments off the track, when you decide how best to prepare for your next tour or planet.

In addition to your individual racing style, you get to choose from one of three standard-issue vehicles: the landspeeder favored by Han and Luke, the swoop bike, or the new skim speeder. The skim speeder is sort of a miniature podracer crossed with the ski speeders from act four of The Last Jedi, and it’s the one I spent the most time with by far. You’ll also climb into some experimental builds along the way, including the legendary podracer, as you move through the ranks of the Galactic League. You can customize your vehicles independently of one another, choose some colors and decals that speak to you, and give your pilot one of a handful of outfits and voices.

To return to the Slay the Spire comparison, Galactic Racer’s story is divided neatly into three distinct acts (or “tours”), but it avoids too much frustration by having you return to the start of a given act in the event of a knockout failure—as opposed to sending you back to the very start of the game. I failed once in act two and once in act three, and I certainly cursed a few times, but I always had a big dumb smile on my face while playing through this.

Its well-written story evolves with each run, each victory, each failure; the League’s status quo undergoes some radical changes. By the time all was said and done, I found myself thinking that Kestar Bool, the game’s antagonist, was a bigger villain than Emperor Palpatine—at the very least, you’re gonna hate that dude.

Without spoiling anything, Galactic Racer has a deep reverence for the world Lucasfilm built in The Phantom Menace, specifically, but it also draws in threads from all corners of Star Wars storytelling: the animated Resistance series, The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens, the books and comics. I learned a little something about Polis Massans, the beings who cared for Padmé Amidala in the final hours of her life. I spent time with some familiar faces, and even befriended a couple of them.

There’s the occasional bit of Mario Kart nonsense, naturally, such as land mines on the track or other enemy abilities, but the level of simulational depth is much closer to Forza Motorsport than your typical arcade racer. Each planet you visit features unique terrain and environmental hazards, so you’ll have to plan ahead and drive accordingly. You have to manage your vehicle’s engine temperature, avoid pools of acid, mitigate status conditions, and consider tweaking your build before you take on the next planet in a given tour. (For example, I really loved the Ramjet Rider playstyle, but the salt flats on planet Crait will choke your engine when you’re directly behind another racer. So I kept a lookout for the specific part upgrade that would make my Ramjet boost immune to the “choke” effect, and that’s how I ended up finishing the campaign.)

Cooling your engines can allow you to spend more time redlining and achieving incredible speeds, but on the frozen wastes of Ando Prime, too much frost on your engines will cause your handling to falter, leading to deadly crashes. So the track is dotted with heat tunnels you’ll have to fly through. You’re allowed to crash a certain number of times per race or event, fortunately, and the autopilot-assisted respawns are fairly forgiving. But crash one time too many, and you’ll be starting the whole act over. Takedowns are right at home in this universe, obviously—we saw Sebulba and others race dirty in the film, and that helps create a welcome sense of danger and high-stakes fun here. But I found the cinematic camera transitions that spotlight these moments to be disorienting and immersion-breaking; they also led to some shaky performance compared to the entire rest of the game, which I reviewed on PC.

I played on an RTX 4070 graphics card into a 1440p Alienware monitor, and I was getting frame rates in the 180 range while running the game on the high graphics preset with frame generation enabled. So if you’re playing on a typical PC rig, you can probably expect some stellar performance with the occasional hiccup, depending on how the launch-day patch smooths things over. I could see myself disabling takedown animations if that’s ever an option, particularly if I’m streaming or playing online and want to give it my all.

In any case, the game looks and plays beautifully, and it distills so much of what’s great about Star Wars—the underdog story, the triumph over imperialist evil, the thrill of an engine roaring beneath a canvas of stars. Cassian Andor and Jar Jar Binks exist in the same universe, and Galactic Racer revels in those contrasts. It’s my favorite Star Wars game of the Disney era, and a phenomenal debut from developer Fuse Games.