Star Wars: Galactic Racer came out on 6 October, and its opening races can be brutal. Fuse Games’ racer, published by Secret Mode, blends arcade racing with a roguelite structure: you work through tours, upgrade your vehicle as you go, and one crash at the wrong moment can wreck a whole run. These tips draw on what the studio has said about its vehicles and on the guides published by GamesRadar and PC Gamer, both of which have played the full game. They should help you avoid the most common mistakes before you start chasing first place.
At a glance
In Star Wars: Galactic Racer, the landspeeder is the most stable vehicle for beginners, while the speeder bike is quicker but far more fragile.
Put your first upgrade points into cornering and resilience, and worry about raw speed later.
The ramjet overheats and needs to cool down, whereas afterburners switch on and off for as long as you have fuel.
Which vehicle to pick in Star Wars: Galactic Racer
You choose between three chassis, as Mike Nelson explained in his hands-on preview of the game for Xbox Wire: the landspeeder, the speeder bike and the skim speeder. Podracers, the saga’s original racing machines, are part of the Star Wars: Galactic Racer line-up too.
For your first runs, the landspeeder forgives the most mistakes. Fuse Games describes it as a large, stable machine that can take plenty of hits without slowing down, best driven with your foot to the floor while you hold speed through corners by drifting. It’s the vehicle that gives you the most breathing room while you learn the tracks.
The speeder bike sits at the other end of the scale: fast, aggressive and a little fragile. You slow it down going into corners to store energy, then burst out the other side. As for the skim speeder, designed for the game with Lucasfilm Games, it handles more like a small racing plane skimming low over the ground. Those descriptions come from the developers themselves, in 80 Level’s breakdown of the vehicle classes.
The developers shared their own favourites in a Steam post on 9 October. Mark Bridges, design director at Fuse Games, takes the landspeeder with a build made for taking out rivals. Game director Bill Lane picks the skim speeder and leans on careful use of abilities, while creative director Kieran Crimmins goes for the speeder bike and plans to win by taking extreme measures. According to the studio, the right build comes down to how you combine racer style, abilities and parts.
Cornering and resilience before top speed
In his guide of tips for Star Wars: Galactic Racer, GamesRadar’s Will Sawyer suggests focusing on finishing each race rather than winning it. Crashing is part of the format, and your permanent upgrades make you sturdier from one run to the next.
When it comes to upgrades, two stats matter most early on. Cornering lets you turn faster and tighter, while resilience cuts down on malfunctions and shields you from hazards on the track. If you get it wrong, it’s easy to fix: at the start of a tour, two Tuning Points are enough to respec your vehicle’s permanent upgrades.
PC Gamer’s Jody Macgregor makes the case for resilience with a specific example. On Sentinel I, straying slightly off the track drops you into boiling acid that quickly drains your ramjet boost. The final race of every tour, on Derven Acos, then mixes Ando Prime’s ice, Lantaana’s lava and Sentinel I’s acid. Investing in resilience before you reach those planets stops a single mistake from costing you an entire tour.
Ramjet, afterburners and the perfect start
In Star Wars: Galactic Racer, managing speed comes down to two tools that behave very differently. The ramjet can overheat to the point of blowing up your vehicle, and once you let go it has to cool down before you can use it again. Afterburners, on the other hand, switch on and off as often as you like, as long as you’ve got fuel. Juggling the two is how you keep your speed up without ending up in pieces.
Before each race, a five-second window lets you run your pre-race checks, button inputs that each grant a bonus. Priming the afterburners starts you on a full tank, priming the vent gets your ramjet ready from the off, and the Status Scrubber makes the perfect start window much bigger. If you’ve fitted Autopilot, prime it first, since it automatically primes every other ability for you.
The perfect start itself isn’t worth obsessing over. GamesRadar finds it tricky to land and not especially rewarding, and suggests hitting the throttle just after the “1” in the countdown, though the exact timing varies by vehicle type. Keep your eyes on shortcuts instead: follow a rival who leaves the main track, and use jumps, because you can still steer in mid-air. Some shortcuts are narrow and run alongside lava, so leave them alone until your resilience is up.
As of 15 October, Star Wars: Galactic Racer costs £49.99 on Steam, where 86% of its 6,768 user reviews are positive. Fuse Games has released two hotfixes since launch: the 8 October patch raises the minimum graphics driver version, checked on boot, and steadies the DLSS options, while the 12 October one brings general stability fixes. After a driver update, the first launch takes a little longer.
Upcoming release dates and major updates are tracked in our games calendar, which you can filter by platform.