Star Wars: Galactic Racer Launches With an 88 Metascore, Star Wars' Best Since KOTOR

Star Wars: Galactic Racer launched on 6 October 2026 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, as Fuse Games marked on Xbox Wire, and its headline Metascore of 88 is the best for a Star Wars game since Knights of the Old Republic in 2003. Steam players are a notch cooler: 77.9% of the first 553 Steam reviews are positive.

This story is built on the Metacritic and OpenCritic pages for each game, Steam's public review and player-count data read on 6 October 2026 at 17:40 UTC, and launch statements from the developer, Amazon and the outlets named below. Nobody at AFK Journal has played the game.

What launched today?

Galactic Racer is the debut game from Fuse Games, a studio formed in 2023 that built it in close collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, with Secret Mode publishing. The campaign is runs-based: you pick a skimspeeder, speeder bike or landspeeder, choose a Racer Style, then stack abilities and parts between races. Crash too often and you 'wreck out', losing a League Token and restarting the tour, as creative director Kieran Crimmins explains in the Xbox Wire post.

How does 88 compare with other Star Wars games?

The 'best since KOTOR' line has been repeated by Push Square and across Reddit since reviews went up on 2 October, so we checked it against the main Metacritic page of every major Star Wars release we could find. It holds: KOTOR II (86) and Jedi: Survivor (85) are the closest since 2003. OpenCritic agrees, with a Top Critic Average of 87 from 42 top critics and 96% of 75 critics recommending it.

The table also shows how loosely critics and Steam players track each other in this series. Battlefront II has the lowest Metascore here and one of the best Steam ratings, while Jedi: Survivor went the other way. A day-one Steam score from 553 reviews is a first reading, not a verdict.

What are Steam players saying?

At 17:37 UTC the Steam version had 13,375 people playing and a 'Mostly Positive' rating (431 of 553 reviews positive; 78.2% of 371 in English). We read the 349 most recent English reviews: 77 were negative, and the most common complaints were crashes (18), handling (17), the price or the in-game Deluxe upsell (16) and the amount of content (14). Several players also expected podracing to be front and centre and found it is one part of the campaign.

Multiplayer came up in only eight of those negative reviews, but it is the complaint the developer has already answered. Online parties are capped at three players and there are no private lobbies; as Push Square reported, the official account said on 5 October that the cap will rise to six players within the first few weeks of launch, while private lobbies are only under consideration.

Can you play it without buying it?

Partly. Amazon put the game on its Luna cloud service at launch for Prime members, telling GamesIndustry.biz that players can jump into the campaign without owning a console. VGC confirms that the Arcade and Scenario modes are included too, so most of the single-player game is streamable at no extra cost. If you are weighing it up, that is the cheapest way to test the handling complaints before paying $59.99.

What we don't know yet

There is no date for the party-size update, no sales figure, and only one launch-day reading of Steam players; console player numbers are not public. Galactic Racer shares its release day with Gears of War: E-Day (our E-Day crossplay explainer covers that one), and the rest of the month is in our October release calendar. We will check the Steam score again once the first week of reviews is in.