The Burnout Veterans Made a Star Wars Racer, and Critics Love It
Star Wars: Galactic Racer sits at 88 on Metacritic ahead of its October 6 launch, and critics keep comparing it to Burnout and Wipeout. Here is what that means.
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An Arcade Racer With an 88 on Metacritic
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches on Tuesday, October 6, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and the review embargo has lifted early enough to tell us something unusual: the best-reviewed racing game of the autumn is a Star Wars licence. It sits at 88 on Metacritic across more than 40 critic reviews, which TheGamer worked out makes it the highest-rated Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic in 2003.
That alone would be worth a headline. What makes it interesting for anyone who grew up with a PS2 controller is the word critics keep reaching for. Not “podracing”, not “nostalgia”. Burnout.
Why Everyone Keeps Saying “Burnout”
There is a simple reason the comparison sticks: the people who made it made Burnout. Fuse Games was founded in 2023 by senior developers from Criterion, the studio behind Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Paradise, and its founder Matt Webster spent years there before working with DICE on the two modern Battlefront games. So this is not a studio imitating Burnout. It is, in large part, the studio that defined it, finally getting to make a track racer again.
It shows in the description of the game itself. You slam, shunt and take down rivals, and the official blurb talks about crashes as something with consequences rather than a pretty slow-motion replay. Webster put it plainly in interviews before launch: racing “is crying out for a bit of consequence”, and the genre has spent ten or fifteen years being about collecting cars instead of racing them on tracks.
Add the speed of Wipeout, the podracer DNA of 1999’s Episode I: Racer, and a soundtrack that Polygon’s Oli Welsh singles out as a reason to play on its own, and you get the line that keeps showing up in reviews. VGC’s Jordan Middler called it “a throwback to the glory days of PS2 racing”. Welsh went further and called it “the best arcade racing game in a generation”.
For anyone who has been waiting since roughly 2008 for somebody to make that kind of game again, that is the whole story. The arcade racer, the kind where boost is a resource and a rival is something you shove into a wall, has been close to extinct on consoles. Everything big since has been an open world, a simulation or Mario Kart.
AdStar Wars Galactic Racer - PlayStation 5 (opens in a new tab)
The arcade racer critics are calling the best in a generation. Standard Edition, out October 6, 2026.
What the Reviews Actually Say
The praise is broad and the scores are tightly bunched, which matters more than any single 10. Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb gave it five stars and called it “everything I hoped it would be”, with a campaign that “keeps giving me reasons to master the tracks”. GameSpot’s Jordan Ramée named it one of his favourite games of the year. TechRadar’s Demi Williams knocked off half a star and still described “amazing buildcraft customization that offers endless possibilities on the track”.
That buildcraft is the part that makes Galactic Racer more than a remake of something you loved at 17. The single-player campaign is run-based, borrowing from roguelites: you work through a procedurally assembled series of races across planets like Tatooine and Jakku, upgrade your machine as you go, and when a run ends, it ends. The story follows Shade, a helmeted racer pulled into the Galactic League, an unsanctioned circuit set up after the fall of the Empire, in the New Republic era. You race podracers, landspeeders, speeder bikes and a new class called skimspeeders. Sebulba is in it. Of course Sebulba is in it.
Welsh is honest about the cost of all that depth: “The learning curve is steep, and there’s a lot to manage and think about in a race.” His payoff line is the one fans will quote: “when you get there, the rush is unmatched.”
Where the Critics Pulled Back
The lower scores are still high, and they agree with each other about what is wrong, which is useful. IGN’s Luke Reilly gave it an 8 and found the run-based campaign “unavoidably tedious over long stints”, because it leans on “repeatedly revisiting the same slim selection of planets”. GamesRadar’s Will Sawyer raised the same planet count, plus a difficulty spike at the end of the third act and a campaign that stops rather abruptly. He still called it a “perfect start” for a debut studio.
Read those together and you get a clear picture. The racing is the strong part. The structure around it is the part that may wear thin if you play it for four hours on a Saturday. For a dad who gets 40 minutes after bedtime, a run-based structure is arguably an advantage: one run is a session, and you stop at a natural point instead of in the middle of a 90-minute championship.
Galactic Racer vs Forza Horizon 6: Two Different Kinds of Fast
The obvious question for anyone with one racing-game budget this year is how this compares with Forza Horizon 6, which Polygon still rates as the year’s best racer. The honest answer: they barely compete.
Forza Horizon is not an arcade racer and it is not a simulation either. The usual term is “sim-cade”: real licensed cars with believable weight and handling, wrapped in an open world where you drive wherever you like and the game hands out rewards for almost anything. We gave Forza Horizon 6 a perfect 5 in our review, and the reason was how welcoming it is. A seven-year-old can pick it up with assists switched on and have a great time in ten minutes, and our Forza Horizon 6 beginner cars guide exists because it rewards slow, curious play.
Galactic Racer is the opposite brief. Closed tracks, no real cars, physics built for spectacle, and a campaign that punishes mistakes on purpose. Burnout and Wipeout are the right reference points, not Forza or Gran Turismo.
| Star Wars: Galactic Racer | Forza Horizon 6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Arcade track racer, run-based campaign | Open-world “sim-cade” racer |
| Vehicles | Podracers, speeders, skimspeeders | Hundreds of real licensed cars |
| Learning curve | Steep by critics’ account | Gentle, heavy assists available |
| Split-screen | No | No |
| Platforms | PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC | Xbox Series X|S, PC (PS5 announced, no date) |
| Best for | Burnout and Wipeout fans | The whole family, any skill level |
If you only buy one: Forza Horizon 6 is the family game, Galactic Racer is the one for you. On PlayStation it is simpler for now: Forza Horizon 6 is announced for PS5 but has no date yet, while Galactic Racer on PS5 arrives Tuesday, PS5 Pro enhanced.
AdStar Wars Galactic Racer - Xbox Series X (opens in a new tab)
The Xbox Series X|S version, with cross-platform online races for up to 12 players.
The Thing Parents Need to Know: No Split-Screen
This is the part most reviews mention in one sentence and families should weigh most. There is no split-screen in Galactic Racer. Multiplayer is online only, up to 12 players with cross-play between PS5, Xbox and PC. Fuse CEO Matt Webster told Traxion in August that the team wanted “that frame rate, that fidelity, that immersion”, and that the compromise needed to get split-screen running “was a stretch too far for us”.
That is a reasonable engineering call and a real loss for a living room. Burnout’s best memories, for a lot of us, are two controllers on one sofa. If racing your kid side by side is the point, this is not the game for it. Mario Kart, as covered in our Mario Kart World Tour review, is still the answer to that problem, and our top family co-op games list has more.
On age: the ESRB rates it E10+ for Fantasy Violence and Language, PEGI 12 in Europe. The violence is ships crashing into ships, no blood, no people. The bigger hurdle for a younger kid is the difficulty critics describe, not the content. There are optional in-game purchases, so if you are handing it to a ten-year-old, our PS5 and Xbox parental controls guide takes about twenty minutes and is worth doing first. The online lobbies are another reason to set it up.
Where It Fits in a Star Wars Year
It has been a strong few months for Star Wars games. Star Wars Zero Company landed at 85 in late August despite being a tactics game in a niche genre, and now a racer has done better. Both share something: neither is coasting on the logo. They are good genre games that happen to be set in a galaxy far, far away.
If your kid’s first contact with podracing was The Phantom Menace, the Boonta Eve race is still the best ten minutes of that film, and Galactic Racer is the first game in twenty years to take that idea seriously. For the build-it-on-the-shelf version, the LEGO Mos Espa Podrace diorama is a nice companion piece. And for a story-driven Star Wars game instead of a racer, Star Wars Outlaws is still our pick.
The Dadnology Take
I have not played it yet, and nobody should pretend a score is a substitute for that. But the shape of these reviews is convincing: high scores across the board, the same two complaints from every critic who has any, and a development team with exactly the history to pull this off. The arcade racer has been missing for most of two console generations, and if you loved Burnout, this is the first serious reason in years to get excited about a track again.
Just go in with the right expectations. It is a game for you, played after the kids are in bed, not a sofa racer for the whole family. For that, Mario Kart still owns the living room. For forty minutes of pure speed on your own, Galactic Racer sounds like the one.
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Disclaimer: This review and its visuals were created with the help of AI. Some links may be affiliate links – we may earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
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