Most racing games forgive a crash. You respawn on the track, lose a few seconds and carry on. Star Wars: Galactic Racer counts every wreck against you, and if you crash too many times in one event or burn through your entry tokens, the whole campaign run ends and you start again from a humble landspeeder. That rule tells you who made it. Fuse Games was founded by former Criterion Games developers, the studio behind Burnout, and this is their first game.

Galactic Racer is developed by Fuse Games and published by Secret Mode, and it launches on October 6, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. It was revealed at The Game Awards in December 2025 alongside Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. Matt Webster, Fuse’s chief executive and co-founder, directs. The studio was set up in Guildford in 2023, and its leads had already worked with Lucasfilm on vehicle combat for Star Wars Battlefront in 2015 and the Starfighter mode of Battlefront II in 2017. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, and Gordy Haab wrote the score.

The story is set in the New Republic era, after Return of the Jedi. With the Empire gone and the galaxy still rebuilding, a former podracer mechanic named Darius Pax has founded the Galactic League, an underground and unsanctioned circuit in the Outer Rim where crime syndicates bankroll the races. You play Shade, a customisable lone racer chasing glory and revenge, recruited by Pax when a rival called Kestar Bool threatens his hold on the League. Two familiar faces from The Phantom Menace, Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros, also turn up.

The tracks visit Tatooine, Crait, Ando Prime and new locations such as Lantaana and Sentinel One. The one Lucasfilm chose to show first is Jakku, the desert planet from The Force Awakens. Its Graveyard of Giants, the field of wreckage left after a crashed Star Destroyer, has been turned into a racetrack, and the hulks of AT-AT walkers sit in the racing line as obstacles.

The campaign, called the Galactic Tour, is built like a roguelite rather than a traditional career mode. Each run is a branching map of events. At every fork you pick between a standard race, a time trial, an eliminator or a mystery event, and some stops let you meet characters who offer side deals. Good finishes and completed objectives pay out credits, parts, stat upgrades and abilities such as ion blasts, shockwaves and a short auto-pilot, so every run builds a different vehicle. A few upgrades carry over permanently between runs. League Entry Tokens act as the safety net: lose them all and the run is over.

There are four kinds of vehicle, and they handle very differently. Landspeeders reward clean racing lines and drifting. Speeder bikes are quicker and twitchier, with heavy braking. Skim speeders, a class Fuse describes as new to Star Wars, fly low over the ground and bank on a knife edge, closer to a starfighter than a car. Podracers are the high-risk option. Every vehicle has two ways to go faster: a safe afterburner, or a ramjet you can push past the redline for a bigger burst, at the risk of your engine blowing up. Takedowns, the Burnout signature of slamming rivals into scenery, are part of the toolkit too.

Reviews landed ahead of launch, and they are strong. Game Informer gave it 8.5 out of 10. Its reviewer, Wesley LeBlanc, called it an excellent racing roguelite and spent around twenty hours on the campaign. He also had a clear complaint: the mandatory podracer events felt too fast and dangerous, and one bad podrace could ruin a whole run. The lack of a minimap made new tracks confusing at those speeds. GamingBolt scored it 9 out of 10, praising the takedowns, the course design and the steady performance, while noting that there are few event types and not much variety within each vehicle class. At the time of writing, the PlayStation 5 version sits at 88 on Metacritic.

Outside the campaign, multiplayer supports up to 12 players. It offers quick races, podracing modes and longer tours built on the same roguelite rules, plus six-race tournaments where players can bet on the results before the start. Unlocks in multiplayer are cosmetic.

The Standard Edition costs $59.99, €59.99 or £49.99. The Deluxe Edition, at $79.99, adds three vehicles, arcade events, banner packs and a digital art book, and the physical Collector’s Edition, at $159.99, comes with a landspeeder model, pilot patches and a steel case. Every pre-order includes a bonus livery and a player banner background.

Galactic Racer is the fifth Star Wars racing game since Episode I: Racer in 1999, and the first one built around the risk of losing everything. Podracing fans get their pods, but the game’s real bet is on the speeders and on the moment a crash ends a run that was going well. From tomorrow, players can find out if that bet pays off.

Tags: gaming, Star Wars, racing games, Burnout, Fuse Games, Secret Mode