Galactic Racer Scores 88, Best Reviewed Star Wars Game Since 2003

When was the last time a new Star Wars game properly got you excited? Galactic Racer, a new racing game made by the people behind Burnout, has just scored 88 on Metacritic on the PS5, which makes it the best reviewed new Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic in 2003.

For me, Knights of the Old Republic is probably one of my favorite games of all time. I've talked about Revan, I rant about the game, and I've bought it on pretty much every device I own. So when something finally gets this close, I'm listening. Galactic Racer isn't really the pod racing game you think it is, and after years of being told that Star Wars is dead, this is probably the first thing in ages that has made me think it's fun again. There's also one decision the developers made that I can't quite believe, and I'll get to it below.

Star Wars is dead again, and then a racing game comes along

Apparently Star Wars has been dead for a long time. Maybe 14 plus years. Every new film, every new series and every new game kind of comes with the same conversation: Disney has ruined it. I believe we can all collectively agree that Star Wars is not what it used to be. Luke, Rey, canon, the sequels, the prequels: somebody somewhere is angry about something.

And then this happens. It's a racing game. Not a massive RPG, not a new Jedi story. There's no galaxy ending threat, and nobody has brought Palpatine back again. It's basically get in a ridiculous machine, go extremely fast and try not to put Sebulba through a wall, and everybody seems happy. I didn't expect that. More than the score, it's Star Wars fans online being excited about the same thing, which is weird, and that might be the most surprising part.

Loving Star Wars started to feel like work

My relationship with Star Wars over the last few years has been weird. I love Star Wars. I've got multiple lightsabers, I'm looking at a Star Wars poster right now and I'm tattooed in Aurebesh. It's been part of my life since I was a kid, even if my childhood Star Wars collection was less rare Kenner figure and more me hitting people with a wrapping paper tube at Christmas.

I'm not one of those people who thinks Star Wars is definitely dead. But I have definitely fallen out of love with it at times, and I think that has just become part of being a Star Wars fan. It kind of started to feel like work. Every new thing arrives carrying all of the baggage of the last thing. The sequels are still being argued about. Luke is still being argued about. Rey is still being argued about. Disney releases something, people decide whether it has saved Star Wars or finally killed it, and then we do it all over again.

When The Mandalorian and Grogu came out this year, we were arranging Star Wars's funeral about five minutes after the box office numbers came out, and I'm kind of tired of that conversation. That's why Galactic Racer feels a bit different. It doesn't have to save Star Wars. It doesn't need to fix Luke Skywalker or tell me about the fate of the entire galaxy. It has just taken one slightly ridiculous part of Star Wars and asked what if this was really, really fun. And maybe I've missed that.

Galactic Racer opens a cupboard marked 1999

I think a big part of why people are so excited is the era it's pulling from. The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, and Episode I Racer came out the same year, in that whole N64 period. I have to be careful here, because I can't pretend Episode I Racer was my big N64 game. For me, that period is Zelda. But apparently half of Reddit had a completely different childhood.

Looking through community posts, one person remembers the summer of 1999, when he went to see The Phantom Menace for a friend's birthday, then went back to his friend's house, where they spent the night playing Episode I Racer and trading Pokémon carts. I think that is the most 1999 sentence ever written. Another person remembers beating the game at a sleepover and still calls it one of their proudest childhood achievements.

That's when I think I understood why people are reacting to Galactic Racer like this. It's not really about remembering a racing game. It's about remembering being 10, sitting on the floor in front of a massive TV, your brother on the other controller, your mate swearing you cheated, and somebody's mom bringing food in while none of you looked away from the screen. Some of these people never even managed to unlock Sebulba, and they're still carrying that trauma 27 years later.

So bringing back Ben Quadinaros, a character who was on screen for about 12 seconds, isn't random. For a certain generation of Star Wars fans, it opens a cupboard in their brain that hasn't been touched since 1999, and apparently it's still full of pod racers and Pokémon cards. Whatever you think of The Phantom Menace, and we've had enough time to make up our minds, the pod race is just Star Wars having fun.

Galactic Racer isn't really a pod racing game, and Sebulba's memories are the clever part

What I think is quite clever is that Galactic Racer hasn't just served up Episode I Racer again, because it's not really a pod racing game. Most of the main campaign is landspeeders, speeder bikes and new skim speeders. And it's a roguelike: you do runs, you upgrade your vehicle, and if it goes horribly wrong, you start again. I'm slightly unsure about that. Reviewers have already kind of mentioned that it gets repetitive, and a roguelike racing game sounds like something I could either lose an entire weekend to or be absolutely sick of by Sunday afternoon.

But they have used pod racing in a way I really like. Sebulba is old now, years after Return of the Jedi, and every so often he starts remembering his racing days, and you actually play those memories as him. I think that's such a good way of doing nostalgia. They could have just put Sebulba on screen and waited for us all to point at him like Leonardo DiCaprio, and to be fair, I probably would have. Instead, you've got an aging former champion looking back on when he was one of the biggest names in the sport. The kid who beat him went on to become Darth Vader. Sebulba just carried on racing, which looking back was probably the healthier career path.

I like the wider setting for the same reason. We're out in the Outer Rim with gamblers, rival drivers and people with grudges, and nobody is trying to destroy the galaxy. They just want to race. It's like those early Mandalorian episodes, where the galaxy felt bigger because the story was smaller.

Knights of the Old Republic has been the bar for 23 years

Then there's that score. Knights of the Old Republic isn't just one of my favorite Star Wars games; it's probably one of my favorite games of all time. I've played Revan's story on the original Xbox and on PC, and I've even played it on my phone. At this point, if somebody gets Knights of the Old Republic running on a fridge, I'm going to play it again.

The Old Republic setting, Malak, the choices, the Revan reveal: that game showed me how good Star Wars could be when it stopped worrying about the films and went off to explore another part of the galaxy. In 23 years I've had enough time to buy it on every electronic device I own, and we are only just getting back there.

Fuse Games brings Burnout speed to Star Wars, but drops split screen

I think there's another reason this one has worked. Fuse Games is full of people who came from Criterion, Burnout and Need for Speed, and you can see it straight away in the speed and the takedowns. This isn't a Star Wars studio trying to work out racing games. It's racing game developers who have been handed the Star Wars toy box.

But they have made one absolutely baffling decision: there's no split screen. You're pressing the 1999 nostalgia button as hard as you can. You're bringing back pod racing. You're bringing back Sebulba. And then I can't sit next to somebody on the sofa and ram them into a wall. That feels illegal. You can't bring back the N64 era and then take the sofa away.

After a week with Galactic Racer: fast and fun, but light on pod racing

When I first wrote this, the game wasn't officially out yet. Since then I've been in a very fortunate position, because a friend of mine very kindly gifted me the game. We were talking about it, and I was saying how gaming is such a big financial commitment at the moment. I've now played it for about a week, because I thought there was no point weighing in until I'd given it a good go.

First off, the racing itself is fast. It's very much an arcade racer, which I think makes sense considering some of the developers worked at Burnout. There is a little bit more going on, though. Just holding down the accelerator and hoping for the best didn't work out for me, so you need brain power. There are two main boost systems that get you up to speed pretty quickly, particularly coming out of corners, and you can get some pretty insane speeds. I ended up pretty much decorating the nearest wall until I got the hang of things. It's a little bit of a mind juggle, but once I'd stopped going way too hard, I think I was all right in the end.

The other interesting thing for me is the campaign. It's essentially a roguelike: you're choosing races, earning upgrades and building your speeder as you go, and you can focus on outright speed, handling or even just smashing your opponents off the track. I actually quite like that approach. It gives you a reason to experiment rather than just upgrading everything until you've got the fastest vehicle.

There are things to work on. For a Star Wars racing game, there is, dare I say it, not that much pod racing in the main campaign, which is kind of strange, and since that's the bit that got me interested in the whole premise, I do feel a little bit let down. I'm also not completely sold on how dependent everything feels on boosting. Maybe I'm playing it wrong, but sometimes it feels less about maintaining your momentum and more about constantly juggling different boost meters, and I think the original Episode I Racer did that really well, from what I've seen.

Overall, though, I like it. Do I like it because it was gifted to me? Would I be this hyped if I'd bought it with my own money? I do think they've done a decent job. It's fast, it's a little bit chaotic, it looks good and it's fun. Is it the spiritual successor to Episode I Racer we've all been wanting? I'm not sure, but it's certainly a lot closer than I thought it might be. And I would much rather see Star Wars experimenting with games like this than playing it safe with just another Jedi swinging a lightsaber around.

Star Wars isn't dead, I was just tired of it

Even with all of that, look at what people are talking about. They're not fighting about canon. They're just excited. You've got people saying "Star Wars gaming is so back," people saying Star Wars fans are eating good, and thousands of grown adults typing "Now this is pod racing" at each other, which might be the healthiest Star Wars conversation we've had in years.

So no, I don't think Star Wars is dead. I think I've probably just been a bit tired of Star Wars, and there's a difference. I didn't stop loving it. I just stopped getting excited, and I stopped feeling like I had to defend everything. Eventually you see another headline telling you Star Wars has been ruined forever and you just shrug.

That's why I don't think the lesson Lucasfilm should take is that everyone loves pod racing now, so it has to go and make a pod racing show. Please don't do that, because that's exactly how we end up with a Sebulba origins series on Disney Plus where somehow Darth Vader turns up in episode six. I think the lesson is much simpler. Let Star Wars be different things. Let somebody make a racing game. Let somebody make a weird RPG. Tell a story about people who aren't Skywalkers, and go somewhere in the timeline where I don't already know how everybody's grandparents are related. Make the stakes smaller, and most importantly, let some of it just be fun.

That is what Knights of the Old Republic did. It went thousands of years somewhere else and trusted that it would still feel like Star Wars. Star Wars is massive, and it shouldn't feel like we've got six characters and three planets to play with. And yes, Galactic Racer is using nostalgia. Sebulba is here, we're back on Tatooine, and there's a massive flashing sign asking if you remember 1999. Unfortunately, I do; my knees also remember 1999. But there's a difference between nostalgia being the whole game and using something familiar to get you into a new idea, and this kind of feels like somebody had an idea.

Have you picked up Galactic Racer yet, or is the missing split screen putting you off?