Rogue-lite One
Right up front I’ll cop to not being much of a Star Wars™ fan, aside from – for whatever reason – being obsessed with Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure as a child. But I’ve managed to live vicariously through fans of the series by way of a multitude of genuinely decent video games over the years. Even an outsider can appreciate the very specific vibe that the long-running franchise has cultivated, and it’s often captured best in these bold, beautiful, interactive worlds.
But Star Wars: Galactic Racer™ is quite unlike the big-budget Star Wars video game adventures we’ve seen in recent years. For starters it’s a racer, in case the title hadn’t made that obvious, but it’s also – as I learned after getting hands-on with the game for a full hour at Summer Game Fest 2026 – something of a roguelite endeavour. Or “runs-based,” if you will. I tend to just call it rogue-ish, personally.
Nomenclature aside, what this means is that Galactic Racer’s campaign doesn’t follow the rules of a typical racing title, not just in how it’s structured or how progression works but also in how it accounts for worldbuilding. See, when you first fire the game up, or at least after the very Forza Horizon-style introductory showcase race, you’ll notice that you’re walking around on foot. Playing as a racer named Shade, you’re here to compete in a high-stakes, unsanctioned, interplanetary circuit called the Galactic League, and that comes with a bit of leg work.
Answering to one Darius Pax, the progenitor of this illicit racing community, your ultimate goal is to make it through a series of events, hopping between planets and taking the downtime to explore each world’s cobbled-together racing hub, chat to folks and fellow racers, and ensure your ride of choice is prepped and primed. It’s a guess on my part, but it seems like these moments where you’re simply allowed to exist in very lovely-looking and familiar (or unfamiliar) Star Wars worlds are going to feel at least a little special.
Once it comes time to actually get behind any one of the three types of speeder vehicle to be driven – a landspeeder, bike or skim speeder – the runs-based campaign is structured such that you’ll progress across three defined Acts with their own specific sequence of planets, but the actual order and nature of race events is delivered as a randomised set of choices. Entry into the League requires validation in the form of League Entry Tokens, and losing an event means losing your tokens, so the type of events laid out, and which ones you choose to work through, can greatly impact your chances of seeing the competition through to the end.
Which is all interesting and good, but what about the actual racing? Well, it’s about as high-octane and frankly thrilling as you’d expect from a title like this. No matter which variation of a speeder you choose it’s fast, visceral, often explosive and never less than nail-biting.
Each planet I visited had its own terrain to deal with, both in the nature of the racing lines carved into the environment and in the conditions of the planet’s atmosphere and weather. Ando Prime’s frigid air means your ramjets don’t overheat as quickly, but all that extra speed and still air can make turning dangerously loose, while Lantaana’s eclectic motley of wetlands and volcanoes means that the rivers you’re crossing can be flowing with water in one moment and lava the next. Your speeder matters too, with the classic landspeeders offering a good combination of size and velocity while the smaller, more nimble speeder bikes are easy targets for a race-ending shunt and the tricky skim speeders can be rolled onto a Knife Edge for skilled maneouvres.
The key to screaming ahead of your opponents is to properly balance speed with the inevitable physics of heat. While each vehicle has a basic boost in the form of an Afterburner, it’s the Ramjet that offers the biggest gains, and biggest risks. Fire it to get an incredible bit of propulsion, and maintain it for as long as you can without careening into a cliff face, but also be wary of it overheating and unceremoniously blowing up. There’s a bit of gleeful exhilaration in redlining your Ramjet while dodging through narrow passageways, extending your lead but knowing you’re either millimetres or milliseconds from being the next shipment of scrap to Watto’s junk shop.
All of this danger is important to the rogue-ish cycle of Galactic Racer, the full extent of which is obviously difficult to get a read on in a short preview session but that does feature a few kinds of meta-progression to keep things moving even after repeated setbacks. I’m curious about the overall length of the campaign and its staying power after the story is done with, but that’ll be something for later exploration. Outside of the solo campaign there are extra modes including an Arcade offering where you can test your skills in curated events, Scenarios that hand you specific characters and builds to take through longer-form challenges, and a Multiplayer offering with a featured Tour Mode as well as Quick Races.
And what kind of Star Wars racer would this be without a spot of podracing? This is accessible through those extra modes but has also been hinted at as part of the main campaign, and while there wasn’t a huge amount of time left in my session I did sample a quick bit of podracing in a standalone event. It was, somehow, even more deadly and heart-pounding than anything I’d done prior, mostly thanks to the exact kinds of razor-thin tunnels and close-quarters clashes that made the sport so exciting in the feature films, so I can see it getting a bit of love in the online multiplayer stakes.
All told, after going in with little notion of what to expect, Star Wars: Galactic Racer has seriously impressed me with some top-notch arcade racing action and an intriguing campaign setup that exhibits exactly the kind of big-budget sheen that franchise fans should be pleased with. I’m absolutely ready for more when the game launches on October 6, 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.