At Summer Game Fest 2026, one booth interested me a lot more than I imagined it would when we arrived, Star Wars: Galactic Racer. I initially envisioned this game as just a redo of the popular Star Wars Racer Revenge game that was made for the PlayStation 2 back in 2002. The prequel era of Star Wars held a lot of video games to try to grab kids’ attention. Back then, it worked like a charm for me. I consumed whatever Star Wars content I could, regardless of its quality. It also had times where the Star Wars label enhanced the experience, like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. After diving into Star Wars: Galactic Racer for an hour, this is a game that has much more quality than I was expecting.
The Story
The first thing that I was able to do was begin the game from the very beginning of the campaign. Your silent protagonist is known as Shade. You will have access to a variety of outfits for your character, and you can choose certain colors for those outfits. You begin the game by delivering a package for Darius Pax. He is the owner of the Galactic Racing League. A racing league that can be joined by a racer who has any kind of racing ship.
A ship can be a speeder, a skim, or a landspeeder. The package you deliver to Darius is a ship that he hopes that Shade can use to race in the league. Darius is worried about Kestar Boon since he is the champion and is seemingly getting more and more support on his side. This is making Darius nervous as to the ownership of the league and his own stance of power. He wants to recruit Shade to put a wrench into the rise of Kestar Boon and hopes that your character can make him have less control over the league.
Shade does a preliminary race to show off to the league and immediately makes an enemy of Kestar Boon. This preliminary race is the tutorial for how to play the game. You hold the right trigger down to accelerate your ship. You can also break with the left trigger. Drifting is breaking while turning. You can also use the special abilities of your ship. The first special ability you have access to is a shield that reduces damage and knockback from external forces.
This is helpful as this game has some very chaotic and explosive enemy AI. They want to shove you and push you into the walls. They will even go out of their way to slow down from jumps just so they can slam on top of you. On the normal difficulty, you are given three lives to finish a race. In this race, and oddly enough, many others, the goal is not to win the race; it is to survive the race. Harder difficulties mean fewer lives. Easier ones mean more lives. If you win, you get more currency to purchase upgrades, so winning is still encouraged.
Once this race is finished, Darius gets mad at Shade since becoming an enemy of Kestar Boon means your character has fewer opportunities to get sponsored in the league. Darius eventually decides to be a shadow sponsor so you can continue to race in the league and hands you a token. This token lets you race in the Galactic Racing League. The campaign works in a roguelike manner. You choose one of two paths to go down, and the paths are procedurally generated. The first race, however, is always the same, a survival race with 12 racers.
Every race after that is different. You will have challenge races where you have to fulfil requirements such as holding turbo for a long period of time. You also have elimination races where you have to destroy all the other racers and finish the race. These races take place on planets. When you finish a path on one planet, you go onto the next in the league. Not every race will make you lose your token. Once you lose the token, you have to restart the league completely and get a new token from Darius. Sometimes it is good to restart the league, though you can use the currency you have made to enhance your ship or to get a different ship entirely.
After a race, you usually get some extra points you can add to your ship’s stats. These stats include max speed, acceleration, drifting, durability, and more. I usually focused on drifting and max speed. One thing I discovered pretty early on while playing this game, drifting is fun. This game has the best feel of drifting than any racing game I have ever played. You can turn your ship and break almost to an exact 90-degree angle if you time it right. It also gives you insane control of your ship, which makes the tight turns more of a fun obstacle than a reason to slow down.
Arcade Mode
Star Wars: Galactic Racer isn’t just a story-based experience. It also has an arcade mode with a variety of challenges. The one that the team there wanted us to try out was the Podracing missions. This has a time challenge mechanic where the faster you finish the race, the more points you earn, and the goal is to get three stars. Podracing is a whole new beast entirely than the normal Galactic Racer ships you usually access.
I tried a mission with Sebulba where he races through the Boonta Eve of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Sebulba can hit speeds of around 1000 km/h, while the other ships I was racing in the campaign mode would max out around 600 km/h. The turns are tighter, and the areas are smaller you need to navigate with the Boonta Eve Classic race.
After spending about 40 minutes in the campaign mode, I was riding high and felt confident in my ability to grasp the main controls. I was wrong. Podracing is a whole other beast, and I got wrecked the first attempt. Sebulba’s special ability is his flamethrower that shoots off his podracer, and it was very helpful against enemy racers trying to hit me or crash me into obstacles with the tight turns.
The second arcade race I tried was using Ben Quadinaros in a podrace on a different planet. It was very fun because his podracer is a monster in size. He can destroy ships fairly easily. I did not hit the time requirement for three stars, but I did end up in first place simply because I would absolutely destroy and push all the other racers off cliffs and into walls. He was a racer of pure destruction and chaos, and it shows just how satisfying this game can be.
When you destroy a racer or smash a ship into the wall, there is a small slowdown of the race as the camera shifts towards the enemy that you caused to crash or fall off the cliff. In this arcade race, I started to laugh maniacally every time this happened, just because I loved watching the racers turn into scrap metal.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer isn’t just a licensed game for a popular franchise. It is a full-on racing game. It controls well, it looks great, and it feels satisfying to play. The hour I had to play the game was more than enough to turn me into a Galactic Race League believer.
I look forward to the full release of Star Wars: Galactic Racer when it launches for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 6th, 2026.
