It’s been a good few months for Star Wars games. Star Wars Zero Company was released in late August to a fantastic critical reception, with a metascore currently sitting at 85, despite it existing in a somewhat niche tactics genre. Now Star Wars: Galactic Racer is here, an arcade racer that is the lovechild of Burnout and Wipeout, two iconic racing games from the gaming of yesteryear.
As of this writing, Star Wars: Galactic Racer has a metascore of 88, based on 44 critic reviews, and an OpenCritic score of 87. That isn’t quite as high as the year’s best racing game and game of the year contender, Forza Horizon 6, but for a debut game from developer Fuse Games, in this innovative arcade-racer-meets-roguelite hybrid genre? It’s higher than most people predicted.
While it isn’t a scored review, Polygon’s Oli Welsh describes it as “the best arcade racing game in a generation,” praising its orchestral soundtrack, vivid cast, planetary biomes, and audio design. “Speed never sounded so good as it does in Star Wars,” he writes. Oli also praises the game’s difficulty: “The learning curve is steep, and there’s a lot to manage and think about in a race. But boy, when you get there, the rush is unmatched.”
Meanwhile, Giantbomb’s Jeff Grubb gave it five stars out of five, calling it “everything I hoped it would be. Fuse built a campaign that keeps giving me reasons to master the tracks, then made the racing feel good enough that I wanted to.” VGC’s Jordan Middler echoed that score, calling it “a throwback to the glory days of PS2 racing, and one of the best arcade racers in years.”
TechRadar’s Demi Williams took off half a star, awarding it 4.5 stars in total, and describes it as “an exhilarating, highly engaging roguelike racer with amazing buildcraft customization that offers endless possibilities on the track.” At GameSpot, Jordan Ramée has it as one of their favorite games of the year: “Every moment feels joyfully fast. Every decision carries the weight of tension. And every run is a rewarding chance to learn, improve, tinker, and adapt, whether it ends in success or failure.”
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On the lower end — and that’s saying something, because 8/10 is still an excellent score — IGN’s Luke Reilly highlights the run-based campaign as being “unavoidably tedious over long stints because of its heavy reliance on repeatedly revisiting the same slim selection of planets,” but other than the lack of a split-screen multiplayer option, those are his only complaints.
GamesRadar’s Will Sawyer has similar thoughts about the number of planets, while he also mentions a difficulty spike at the end of the game’s third act as being particularly annoying, and the campaign ends abruptly. That said, he also describes Galactic Racer as akin to a “proud rebel when compared to the current racing game landscape,” and he considers it a “perfect start” for Fuse Games.