Star Wars: Galactic Racer is my childhood podracing dream come true
The new Star Wars racing game is probably as close as you can get to actually piloting a podracer.
The new Star Wars racing game is probably as close as you can get to actually piloting a podracer.
by
Jay Peters
Oct 2, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC
Image: Secret Mode
Jay Peters
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
The podracing scene inThe Phantom Menaceis one of my favorite movie sequences ever. It’s just so dang cool: The futuristic racers tear over treacherous Tatooine terrain while variousStar Warsaliens bark at each other in incomprehensible sci-fi languages. Eventually a young Anakin Skywalker proves his mettle by clawing his way from the back of the pack to win the race, which left an impression on me when I first saw it at 10 years old. I always wished I could pilot a podracer myself. Over the past several days, I’ve been able to live out that dream thanks toStar Wars: Galactic Racer, which takes everything from that brilliant scene and packs it into a thrilling video game.
InGalactic Racer’s campaign, you play as Shade, a cargo pilot who gets a shot at racing in the underground Galactic League circuit to eventually challenge the smarmy champion Kestar Bool. The game is basically a roguelike. You start a run (called a “tour”) by picking between a few different vehicles — though you don’t get to drive a podracer until partway through the campaign — and selecting various perks that can influence your style of play. Races themselves take place across a few planets, including the desert Jakku planet fromThe Force Awakens, and you’ll pick different events to participate in from a branching map screen. After each race, you’ll get rewards to help craft your build, and along the way, you’ll also play brief sections where you walk around as Shade, talk with other characters, and upgrade your vehicle.
Image: Secret Mode
It’s all standard roguelike stuff, but the familiar format lets me better focus on the races themselves, which arereallyintense. Turns and obstacles that look far away come up in the blink of an eye, forcing you to react in an instant. Two different kinds of boosts mean you’re constantly surging forward in some way. And all the while, other racers are on the hunt, often ramming your craft or targeting you with weapons. I nearly always felt like I wasjuston the cusp of losing control, and a split-second mistake usually results in a crash. (When you crash, the whole game also briefly stops to showcase your wreckage flying across the track, which is satisfying in its own way.) Things get even more intense when you finally get into an actual podracer.
It’s extreme in the way that I imagined racing a vehicle in theStar Warsuniverse would actually be. There’s more to that feeling than the races themselves, though as developer Fuse Games — a relatively new studio with former staffers ofNeed for Speed,Burnout, andStar Wars Battlefrontmaker Criterion Games — makes the whole experience feel authenticallyStar Wars. The speeders and vehicles are grungy and worn, and your fellow racers constantly bicker at each other. (You’ll hear a lot ofHuttese.) There are wipe transitions between scenes and bombastic, John Williams-esque music. My favorite touch might be the brief scene before each race where you press different buttons to prepare your vehicle, like what the racers do inThe Phantom Menace.
Image: Secret Mode
That intensity also means that the campaign can be frustrating. I crashed a lot, often because I couldn’t see an obstacle in front of me until far too late, and the opposing racers can be extremely aggressive. I sometimes wished I actually had the reflexes of a Jedi to be able to keep up. A run can take a long time — late in the game, they can exceed two hours — which makes a late loss exasperating. Between tours, you can permanently boost your vehicle’s stats to make the next run easier, though that wasn’t always enough to make the pain of a loss worth it. Occasionally, I turned down the difficulty so that I could play without as much pressure.
Even after a brutal tour, though, I kept finding myself thinking about when I could carve out the time for another run.Galactic Racerisn’t the firstStar Warsracing title, but it feels like the best realization yet of a game that embodies what madeThe Phantom Menace’s racing scene so memorable. I know I’ll never actually get to pilot a podracer, butGalactic Raceris close enough for me to live out my childhood dream.
Star Wars: Galactic Racerlaunches on October 6th on PC, PS5, and Xbox.
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