A deafening roar of twin engines and a blinding flash of Tatooine suns erupted across The Game Awards stage on Thursday night as Fuse Games and Lucasfilm Games unleashed the first trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer. The surprise announcement instantly transported the arena back to the white-knuckle chaos of Boonta Eve, revealing a full-blooded return to high-stakes Star Wars racing built from the ground up for modern consoles and PC.
Developed by the veteran team at Fuse Games—responsible for some of the most beloved Need for Speed and Burnout titles—the game promises to fuse blistering speed, sabotage-filled rivalries, and meaningful progression into the most ambitious Star Wars racer in over two decades. Check out the trailer for Star Wars: Galactic Racer below:
Star Wars: Galactic Racer appears to pay homage to the groundbreaking Episode 1: Racer from 1999, the N64 classic that captured the chaotic thrill of podracing on Tatooine and beyond. Just as that title let players pilot nimble vehicles through treacherous tracks inspired by The Phantom Menace, the new game expands the formula with diverse repulsorcraft classes, from agile speederbikes that demand aggressive braking and acceleration to skim speeders that favor fluid momentum and precision banking. This nod to the past blends nostalgia with contemporary roguelike elements, where player choices in upgrades and routes create branching paths toward galactic dominance, all while echoing the original's sense of unbridled velocity and sabotage-filled rivalries.
The cinematic trailer wasted no time diving into familiar territory from the sequel trilogy, spotlighting a rugged racetrack on Jakku that weaves perilously close to the skeletal husks of an AT-AT graveyard straight out of The Rise of Skywalker. Pilots dart between a crashed Star Destroyer and jagged wreckage in the Graveyard of Giants, their engines howling amid swirling sandstorms. The sequence builds to a tantalizing close with a shadowy glimpse of Sebulba, the cunning Dug racer whose flame-throwing pods once terrorized a young Anakin Skywalker on the Boonta Eve Classic, hinting at his return to stir up old grudges on the circuit.
Credit:
Fuse Games / Lucasfilm Games
At the core of Star Wars: Galactic Racer lies a gripping solo campaign centered on Shade, a determined outsider racer fueled by ambitions of legendary status and a burning quest for retribution. As players guide Shade through the cutthroat ranks of the elite league, they'll tinker with pod customizations to hone their machine's edge, clash head-on with scheming competitors, and blaze trails across wildly varied worlds—from barren deserts to toxic badlands—that test every ounce of skill and strategy.
Players will learn more about Shade as they progress through the game’s campaign. Your aim is to survive long enough to earn your shot at becoming an elite racing pilot. Our races are high-stakes competitions where racers do everything they can to get to the front in the solo campaign and in our awesome multiplayer gameplay.
Fuse Games co-founder Matt Webster elaborated on the depth of progression, drawing from roguelite mechanics to infuse every run with purpose. Shade's journey unfolds across hazardous circuits like the acid-laced rivers and fume-choked antennas of Sentinel One, a plundered Skakoan outpost where environmental perils force adaptive tactics. Multiplayer modes amp up the chaos, pitting squads against each other in synchronized class races where speederbikes and skim speeders collide in spectacular, physics-driven mayhem.
We’ve drawn real inspiration from runs-based games so the player will have meaningful, consequential decisions to be making on how they chose their path to become an elite racing pilot — from the vehicle they choose to start with, the upgrade choices they make to create a build that really suits their playstyle and what events they select in determining their path to become champion of the League. Along the way you’ll compete with rivals, journey to new planets, and master different classes of repulsor craft — or speeders — each with their own distinct capabilities.
While platforms and an exact launch window remain under wraps, the trailer's pulse-pounding visuals—from Shade's confident strut in the Jakku paddock to knife-edge maneuvers on Ando Prime—signal a return to form for Star Wars racing. With Sebulba's smirking cameo teasing deeper lore ties, Galactic Racer positions itself as more than a speed demon; it's a narrative-fueled thrill ride ready to etch new legends in the stars.
Source: StarWars.com
