From the moment developer Fuse Games was founded in January 2023, the intent for the studio was to make a Star Wars racing game. CEO Matt Webster tells me that roughly three weeks into the studio's life, the team were on a plane to visit Lucasfilm Games and pitch the idea – "Galactic Racer".
As a studio founded by former Criterion Games developers (Criterion Games previously helmed the Burnout series and later worked on EA's 2015 Star Wars Battlefront and its sequel), fusing the team's arcade racing pedigree and previous experience working on Star Wars titles, as Fuse's creative director Kieran Crimmins says, was "a no-brainer"). While 'Burnout but Star Wars' is certainly an intriguing pitch on its own (I was absolutely hooked on the concept from its first reveal in December 2025), the team at Fuse wasn't content with just going back to familiar territory when you need to stand out amongst a galaxy of games.
Burnt out
Star Wars: Galactic Racer review: "True to its Burnout legacy, blisteringly fast space racing keeps me coming back to the grid"
With series like Forza Horizon and Gran Turismo dominating the triple-A racing space, the focus has shifted from arcade action to realism and scale that makes the most of modern hardware. More cars, more tracks, vast open worlds, and endless rewards, for anyone and everyone. Even Mario Kart, one of the last mainstream bastions for arcade racing, followed suit with Mario Kart World's core feature being an open world.
With their heritage and expertise from the arcade racing of the 2000s, the developers at Fuse Games were never going to follow the crowd when making Star Wars: Galactic Racer. "I think these guys at Fuse could've absolutely made just a killer arcade racing game," says Craig Derrick, executive producer at Lucasfilm Games. "But there was always the intention, I think from the very beginning, of "how do we push the genre forward?"
It's not the first time the founders of Fuse have pioneered the genre either, with their previous work at Criterion Games partly shaping modern racing games too. 2008's Burnout Paradise – while not the first open-world racing game – undoubtedly went on to influence the first entries in the Forza Horizon and The Crew series, thanks to a map that lacked defined tracks and acted more as a driving playground.
Crimmins describes this post-Burnout Paradise shift as a "sea change" but feels that there hasn't quite been another one in the racing genre since, despite there being plenty of polished racers across the triple-A and indie space. Specifically, he believes that consequences are "sorely missing" in big racing games, with Webster adding that some feel a bit toothless: "I think there's been a bit of a burnishing off of, I suppose, the edge in [racing games]. You put a car in the wall and what's going to happen? And if it's nothing, then it just falls a little bit flat from an emotional perspective."
Rogue One
So, looking to make waves by bringing back consequence with Galactic Racer and after a lot of prototyping, the team at Fuse Games determined that the runs-based, roguelike-inspired format was the way to go. As I noted in my Star Wars: Galactic Racer review, I couldn't believe that this racing-roguelike hybrid had never been attempted before by a mainstream studio because it's a natural fit.
Applying a runs-based structure to an arcade racer fights against "a bunch of racing game conventions", explains Webster. As well as facing little to no consequences, players are also conditioned to win all the time in a lot of modern racing games, which is something that the roguelike mechanics in Star Wars: Galactic Racer vehemently oppose. "This game should challenge you, and we wanted to front that up, so you feel like 'a hard-fought fifth place? Yeah, I'll take it'," Webster says.
Getting that balance right is incredibly important to give you that emotional high when you do win
Hurtling around Galactic Racer's circuits and inevitably obliterating your speeder means winning your first few events is unlikely, and it's an oddly refreshing humbling experience. Those crashes are also where Burnout's DNA shines through most in Galactic Racer. It also feels like classic Star Wars, which makes sense as Webster says that, in a full-circle moment, they were inspired by The Phantom Menace back in the day.
"When we were making Burnout, the podracing sequence in Episode One was a massive influence in terms of the drama and the excitement and the sheer speed and power, and the visceral nature of those crashes was a big inspiration," he says. Bringing those back in a true Star Wars setting with a roguelike structure means each crash serves as a "learning moment" too, and, indeed, I quickly learned that survival is the priority, not victory.
Bring balance
However, Galactic Racer was once a lot more punishing. Going over previous iterations of the wrecking out loop, Webster and Crimmins share that there was a version where you could crash only once instead of three times, and another where you had to finish in the top three every time – the latter lives on as the Eliminator event. Webster also says that Galactic Racer asks a lot from its players in terms of cognitive load.
But it also went the other way, as Crimmins explains there was a version that was much more straightforward. "It felt like it lost all its teeth, and now it feels trivial, and my decisions don't matter," he says. "Getting that balance right is incredibly important to give you that emotional high when you do win but also give you that impetus to move forward when you don't."
That's a doubly difficult balance to strike when a chunk of your audience might also just be in it for Star Wars with little to no experience with racing games. As Derrick explains, that meant making the game accessible without pulling back from what Fuse wanted to do, with the game's narrative and Shade's journey being crucial.
"We onboard you through a fun racing story," Derrick says. "Then we put you in the paddock, and now you have a place where you've decreased the pace for just a minute, so that you can kind of get a sense of the world and feel where your place is. And then we start to amp it up and then push the challenge. Then it's rewarding because it's not punitive."
Despite Galactic Racer being challenging at times, making an accessible and true arcade racer was core to Webster's philosophy. "'Arcade' is not the absence of depth. It's how the game presents itself to you, making it super approachable," he says. "I can get in, have an amazing experience really quickly, but it wants me to carry on. And I think that's really what we've done [with Galactic Racer] is embrace that and modernize it in a way that keeps its heart but also begins to add some contemporary game aspects."
Those peaks and troughs of intensity, difficulty, and strategy from the runs-based format are what make Star Wars: Galactic Racer so engaging to me. Rather than being a dopamine stream of first-place finishes and prizes that eventually ring hollow, or getting bogged down in realistic simulation, it forces you to get used to fighting for every position and taking great risks in a way that most modern racing games don't. For that reason, Galactic Racer could represent another sea change for the genre.
Galactic Racer is easily one of the best Star Wars games if you're feeling the Force. And its runs-based twist means it's also one of the best racing games you can play right now!
