Star Wars: Galactic Racer preview and interview – the next best thing to F-Zero

Sebulba strikes back in the first Star Wars racer in over 20 years and we’ve spoken with the game’s creative director about his return, podracers, and the future of Fuse Games. 

After high ground memes and John Williams’ Duel Of The Fates, the prequel trilogy’s most valuable contribution to Star Wars is podracing. The high-speed showdown between Anakin Skywalker and Sebulba in The Phantom Menace has inspired several games over the years, most notably 1999’s Episode 1: Racer for the Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast. The simulation was heightened in the arcade version, which benefitted from actual lever controls to fulfill the turbo fantasy. 

In retrospect, imaginations at the dawn of the millennium did a lot of heavy lifting for video games. Ahead of our preview for Star Wars: Galactic Racer, we booted up the last podracing game, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, which came out on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. While the sense of speed and momentum still holds up, visually it’s the equivalent of a double-barrelled bog brush being jettisoned through sewage at 500mph. 

In comparison, and over 20 years later, Star Wars: Galactic Racer is shaping up to deliver the wish fulfilment podracing junkies thought they were getting with those titles of yesteryear – with some unexpected layers in its systems that push it above just a nostalgic retread. 

If it wasn’t clear from the trailers, Star Wars Galactic Racer combines land speeders, speeder bikes, skim speeders, and podracing into one Star Wars package. However, while the first three vehicles can square off against one another in races simultaneously, podracers are separated into modes of their own. Creative director Kieran Crimmins explains why below, and while it is initially disappointing, it makes sense from a canon perspective and to add variety to Galactic Racer’s gameplay suite. 

At the start of our preview session, we were introduced to the lower grade vehicles in a nifty tutorial, which provides an overview of their unique traits. Land speeders are all-rounders with high durability. Skim speeders are adept at manoeuvring tight corners with a vertical ‘knife-edge’ drift, while the speeder bikes – our personal favourite – get a small boost when they launch from drifts, in a vein not too dissimilar to kart racers. 

While each vehicle has their unique qualities, the crux of the racing comes down to the juggle between two mechanics: the basic turbo thrusters and the ramjet. They’re both ostensibly boosts, but the latter is designed to batter opponents into walls or derail them into other obstacles. These are both tied to cooldown meters, with the ramjet coming with the extra risk of overheating if you floor it for too long. 

The skill in Galactic Racer, like other future racing games, is managing these thrusters while navigating the tracks, which are littered with acid pools, lava pits, and claustrophobic caves, at ferociously high speeds. Like F-Zero, the sense of velocity is immense, as you barrel around corners, thump opponents into walls, squeeze through shortcuts, and teeter on the edge of survival until you’re at the front of the pack. 

You’re trying to avoid exploding into smithereens, but Galactic Racer’s crashes, like Burnout, are spectacles in their own right. The camera dramatically swings round in slow motion if you’re responsible for another racer’s demise, as the whirring debris spirals skywards. The same pageantry is applied to your own clumsy deaths, and while it’s wounding to have a slight miscalculation result in oblivion (you do, thankfully, respawn), the crashing theatrics alleviate the frustration because they are so slick. 

Whereas those vehicles are less prone to burning up, podracers are the Formula One-esque glass cannons. The speed is cranked up, small nudges turn into life-threatening scrapes, and hammering the thrusters is a tactical dance with death. Mechanically, podracing is mostly the same as the other vehicles, but the heightened speed and fragility forces you to adjust your approach – in a way which feels in step with how podracing should feel within the Star Wars universe. 

Beyond the racing, developer Fuse Games – a team of ex-Burnout and Need For Speed veterans – appear to understand the tactility that makes Star Wars vehicles so compelling. At the start of each race, you enter timed button sequences to fire up the engines, while the ramjet itself is activated mid-race by clicking in a stick, before you slam the trigger. They’re small details, but the extra – and arguably unnecessary – inputs only heighten the belief you’re manning an elaborate machine. 

Our biggest question marks revolve around the single-player experience. There’s an arcade mode where you complete races under pre-determined conditions, but the centrepiece is a story-driven campaign mode with roguelike elements. It’s structured in a similar vein to Star Fox, where you complete stages across a grid of branching pathways of your choosing, as you progress across various planets, and buy upgrades for your vehicle, in order to conquer the Galactic League. 

The stages we played ranged across standard races, eliminator races where you have to finish in the top three to proceed, and field tests. The latter was essentially a minigame where you have to use the ramjet a set amount over three laps, forcing you to rocket around the track almost constantly to hit the prescribed amount. It was our favourite part of the campaign, and we hope there are more challenges like that in the final game. 

We didn’t have enough time to complete a run, and while we enjoyed what we played, we did wonder what the incentive is to keep going back when you have beaten it once. There are four difficulty options though, and if there are unlockables tied to completing runs in certain ways, it could be a compelling alternative to the average solo experience in arcade racers. 

The run-based setup is more convincing in multiplayer. In the Multiplayer Tour mode, you compete over a series of races with up to 12 people online, and in between events, you can buy perks and attribute points to modify your ride. In a neat touch, you can also bet on your placement on the next race in order to earn more credits for upgrades, and assign yourself a rival, which adds a gambling metagame to proceedings. The tour culminates with the Championship, which is an extended race where your fully customised rides are put to the test. 

While there’s a chance people will quickly figure out any overpowered builds, the two rounds we played showed how the tide can turn if you tune to your preferred playstyle. After two dismal finishes in the middle of the pack, we sunk attribute points into the speeder bike’s ramjet, lessened its cooldown period via a perk, and tailored our build to blasting at full velocity for extended periods – having done well in the field tests where you thrust around at full pelt despite the high crash risks.

These adjustments led to a string of wins, and the Championship. Our ego isn’t willing to admit if there could be some imbalance between which stats are more likely to improve your chances over others (for clarity, we placed fourth in the podracing Multiplayer Tour) but there are plenty of abilities we didn’t experiment with – between a temporary autopilot function, deployable bombs, and souped-up drifting perks. 

While we have questions around the flexibility of builds and the extent of the single-player portion, the greatest compliment we can pay Star Wars: Galactic Racer is that, after playing it for around two hours, we didn’t want to stop. At a time when WipEout and F-Zero have faded into obscurity, this looks destined to not only be the best Star Wars racing game ever made, but a triumphant comeback for sci-fi racers at large. 

Following our hands-on, we spoke with Fuse Games creative director Kieran Crimmins about the origins of Star Wars: Galactic Racer and how its setting was partly inspired by the fallout of the Second World War. 

GC: It’s been over 20 years since the last Star Wars racing game. How did this all come about with Lucasfilm and why now? 

KC: I have no idea about the drought but from my point of view… I’ve made a lot of racing games in my time and we’re all veteran racing game makers, and we started this new studio to make interesting games that we loved. And this [idea] was the most obvious one that we’re like, ‘If we can make this game, this will be absolutely phenomenal.’ So in the initial pitch period, there were only a small amount of us in the company, and we’re pitching around ideas.

We have an idea for this game, and because we’ve worked with Lucasfilm before in previous jobs, we have the privilege of knowing some people to call and being able to pitch it up to them. Luckily, when we said, ‘Is this interesting to you?’ They were like, ‘Yeah we trust you because we know you’ve made great racing games before, but also we wanted to make a game as well.’ 

It was less about, now is the perfect time. I think it was more about the right people coming together with the right skills, so that they can trust us to make something that’s going to be good. Also we’re in the place where we’re able to decide our own destiny and make the game we want to make. 

GC: I wanted to ask about Galactic Racer’s place on the Star Wars timeline. This is set after Return Of The Jedi, I believe? How did you land in that period? 

KC: Yes, it’s after the Battle of Yavin – between there and where The Mandalorian starts [five years after Return Of The Jedi]. The Empire has fallen, the New Republic’s rebuilding, and the Galactic Racing League is being made as an almost post-war celebration of speed and vehicles and stuff like that.

The time period and the story of the Galactic Racing League is based on real life. After World War II, there was a big resurgence in drag racing, and [other] different kinds of racing, and it’s the kind of racing that George Lucas was referencing when he made the original podracers.

That kind of post-war boom racing. Also [there were] a bunch of people that were fighting in the war and now don’t necessarily have something to do, so a lot of the characters [in Galactic Racer] have become post-war characters who are now racing. 

It felt like a great place to set the story we wanted to tell, but also a great place to draw from so much of the great visual language and stories you can tell in Star Wars. Because certainly with the prequels and the original trilogy, you’ve got this incredible backlog of lore and characters. So that’s how we ended up in that space. We’re in a really tight collaboration with Lucasfilm, so there’s a lot of back and forth on what’s the right one. But ultimately, it comes down to, what is the story we’re trying to tell, and how does that make sense within the Star Wars timeline. 

The story is canon. We work very closely with the Star Wars storytelling team to make sure it’s canon. Everything in there is 100% authentic. All the characters are represented in the way that we want them to represent. But then, even smaller things, like we’ll write the story we want to tell, but then [Lucasfilm will] be like, ‘OK, this is how we would make that more Star Wars’ and ‘This is what the Star Wars characterisations are more typically like’. It’s not only canon, it’s more crafted to feel like an incredibly authentic Star Wars story. 

GC: I wondered if this is the first confirmation we have that Sebulba and other podracers from The Phantom Menace are alive at this time? 

KC: That’s the kind of question you’d have to ask the story team. All I know is that when you look at Sebulba, he’s probably one of the iconic faces of racing within the Star Wars universe. So when we’re looking to make a story, you’re like, OK this guy is an incredible character, this kind of underhanded racer who is also incredibly talented, and may possibly be around in this timeline. [Lucasfilm] confirmed that he was, so he has to be in the game. So we made him an integral part of the story. 

GC: In terms of the campaign, did you experiment with a lot of ideas before you landed on the roguelike approach? 

KC: So for the roguelike stuff, we experimented with lots of different types of play but our goals were always the same. We wanted to add consequence, we wanted to add depth, and we wanted to add agency. We wanted to make every upgrade, every corner, and every race feel meaningful.

We wanted both depth in driving mechanics but also depth in upgrades. And we wanted a system that would give the players as much agency as possible, so they’re able to make lots of choices, and then they’re able to remake those choices if they did wrong, rather than just building up your vehicle to be the best that’s possible and then sticking with it – something where you would always try something new.

We’ve created this space where there’s so many interesting and cool builds you can make in this, so we needed a system that would enable people to play that over and over again in interesting ways. So I would say it’s more that that type of game design fitted the kind of game we wanted to make, rather than us [being like], maybe we’ll do this, maybe we’ll do that. 

GC: What went into the decision to separate the podracers from the other vehicles? Is there a mode where you can pit a speederbike against a podracer? 

KC: No, we tried it, obviously. The trouble is, podracers are the pinnacle of racing in Star Wars. They’re like our F1 cars. They’re incredibly fast, they’re incredibly delicate, so they have this intense kinetic energy when they crash. They’re also the size of trucks, they’re absolutely huge. So to put them next to a speederbike and a landspeeder, both canonically, they don’t go the same speed, so making them the same speed wouldn’t be right. But they also don’t really play nice in the same space.

But if you think about any racing game, we always have leagues. You often have the super cars versus the normal cars, and we really wanted to expand the space so people can play with as many of the vehicle types that are in Star Wars as possible. We love Star Wars and we love those fantasies so we wanted to make those fun and playable for everyone. So we tried to balance as many as possible so they could be in the same space, but pods need to be their own thing, because they need to be the fastest, the most fragile, the most frenetic, and the biggest. 

GC: You guys have worked on Burnout and Need For Speed in the past, which both have a great sense of momentum and tension in their racing. What is the secret to nailing that feeling in a game and having that weighty impact with crashes? If there is a secret? 

KC: The secret is a lot of hard work like anything in life [laughs]. But you talk about momentum, it’s really interesting. When you first make those crashing physics systems, which is kind of what you’re talking about there, they start off feeling very light, almost toy-like, because that’s kind of how game physics work – so you essentially need to add all these extra impacts and physical elements, anything to make it feel like every crash has weight. It’s a combination of camera tricks, physics hacks, and really smart predictive technology that allows them to do that. 

It is part of the DNA of the studio because so many people have been doing that in racing games for quite a long time, that we probably know quite a lot about it. But, the best way I can describe it is… imagine someone filming a big crash. You don’t just film a crash, you put ropes around it to make it spin, you put extra VFX on it, and then you film it from a certain angle. They’ll spend weeks planning that shot. We make a system that’s able to do all that kind of stuff in a split second and capture something that feels incredibly filmic and weighty and cool, but it’s also completely dynamic. So they’re going to be different every time. 

GC: Yeah as I was playing it just now, I was thinking to myself this must be very hard to do because otherwise everyone would be doing this – in terms of the impact and everything.

KC: It’s hard to do but I think it’s incredibly rewarding. To have when you fail be this big, cool, visceral kind of chaos – it’s one of the most satisfying things. And that’s why I think those old games are so popular, or one of the reasons why they’re so popular. 

GC: In regards to Fuse Games, do you see yourself as a racing game studio? 

KC: So we were set up to make games that we love; we wanted to make games that we love and we wanted to love making games. We’re all big gaming enthusiasts, but we’ve got heritage in racing games. So I don’t think we ever set out to be a genre-specific studio, but a lot of our passions are in that space. I’d actually say the things we hold the dearest are great game feel and vehicle physical experiences, so the things that are easy to pick up and hard to master. And also things that feel visceral inside of the screen.

Also, we worked on Star Wars Battlefront and stuff like that, which has all the same DNA we’re talking about there, so I wouldn’t say we’re a genre-specific studio, but we absolutely love racing games so we’re probably going to make quite a few racing games. 

GC: Well I hope to see many more! Thanks for your time.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (previewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Secret Mode
Developer: Fuse Games
Release Date: 6th October 2026
Age Rating: 16

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