The reviews are in, and Star Wars has a new critical darling. Star Wars: Galactic Racer — the roguelite racer from Fuse Games and publisher Secret Mode — has opened to an 88 Metacritic score from 50 reviews, placing it among the best-rated Star Wars games ever made.
As GamesRadar+ notes, that makes Galactic Racer the fifth-best rated Star Wars game of all time — ahead of every Battlefront title and the Cal Kestis-led Jedi games, trailing only Knights of the Old Republic, Dark Forces 2, Rogue Squadron 2 and Jedi Outcast. For what it’s worth, it also rates higher than every Star Wars film aside from the original 1977 classic.
A Roguelite With Burnout DNA
The premise is a racing game built like a roguelite. You choose between races, elimination events, story encounters and special events, earning money to kit out your vehicle so you can win the final race of each act — and if you lose that race or crash out, you go back to the start with your upgrades lost (though being a Roguelite rather than a Roguelike, your starting machines get better over time). Landspeeders and podracers ghost over the ground on blurry antigrav cushions, with parts, Racer Styles and perk load-outs called Favours layered on top — and damage that can see you lose a part mid-race, or simply explode.
Eurogamer’s five-star review, headlined “sci fi royalty suffers the right kind of Burnout,” calls it a homecoming for the arcade racer: Fuse Games has an awful lot of Criterion DNA coiled up inside it. “Both a surprisingly fun Roguelite campaign and a racing treat for Criterion fans, this is just wonderful stuff,” writes Christian Donlan.
What Critics Are Saying
GamesRadar+ awarded four stars, praising “the carnage-filled arcade racing of the 2000s… with slick and exhilarating high-speed racing that mixes perfectly with a run-based format and roguelike elements.” Full marks have come from Eurogamer, Mirror Gaming, Giant Bomb and Radio Times, while the rest of the reviews sit in Metacritic’s Positive band — including just two 7/10 scores and a single 68/100.
The Star Wars flavor runs deep: droids pass by in the on-foot sections where you visit the shop and chat to rivals, you tap in codes to bring your machine’s systems online like flicking overhead switches in an X-Wing, and there’s even a podracing mode thrown in. The game is set after Return of the Jedi — a “sports movie” story that mirrors the real-life post-WWII motorsports boom — with versions for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.