Star Wars: Galactic Racer's Launch Trailer Revives Podracing for a New Rivalry
Fuse Games and Secret Mode's launch trailer sends racer Shade after reigning Galactic League champion Kestar Bool across landspeeders, skim speeders and podracers.
Fuse Games and Secret Mode marked the October 6 launch of Star Wars: Galactic Racer with an official launch trailer, posted to the game's own YouTube channel, that compresses the finished product's pitch into two minutes and fourteen seconds: outlaw pilots, bruised fenders and a rivalry built to carry a whole campaign. The game is now live on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and the trailer is the clearest look yet at how a studio founded by former Burnout developers chose to reinvent racing inside a galaxy far, far away.
A Circuit Built on Risk and Reward
The trailer opens where the game does: the Outer Rim, years after the Empire's fall, where a once-outlawed racing circuit called the Galactic League has resurfaced under its own chaotic rules. According to Secret Mode's own launch announcement, the League rewards pilots who take the riskiest lines across branching routes through both new locations and planets familiar to the wider franchise, with every shortcut carrying the threat of a race-ending collision.
That risk-reward framing is deliberate. Galactic Racer's marketing has leaned on "runs-based" racing rather than a traditional career ladder, meaning each lap is closer to a single escalating gamble than a fixed circuit lined with checkpoints.
Shade's Grudge Against Kestar Bool
The trailer's few story beats center on Shade, a lone racer introduced as driven equally by ambition and revenge, who enters the League to challenge its reigning champion, Kestar Bool. Secret Mode describes Kestar as a ruthless pilot with his own designs on controlling the circuit's future, which gives the campaign a clear antagonist rather than a vague season-long ranking chase.
Fuse Games has been explicit that the story avoids Jedi, the Force or prophecy entirely. Shade's rise is framed as a matter of skill, nerve and alliances made trackside, which keeps Galactic Racer closer to a street-racing drama than a Star Wars adventure that happens to involve vehicles.
Four Ways to Fly Through a Run
Where the trailer spends most of its runtime is behind the controls, cutting between four distinct craft classes:
- Landspeeders, built for brute-force shunts and takedowns on wider circuits
- Speeder bikes, favoring agility through tighter, debris-strewn passes
- Skim speeders, skating low over water and canyon terrain
- Podracers, the franchise's classic high-speed, high-risk throwback
Each class carries its own handling model, and the trailer's crash-heavy editing makes a point of showing slams and takedowns as a core mechanic rather than a failure state. Runs let players customize builds and unlock new abilities as they go, and the Steam listing confirms competitive multiplayer for one to twelve players, including direct grudge-match duels that echo the Shade-versus-Kestar setup from the campaign.
From Burnout's Studio Heads to the Outer Rim
“For us, Star Wars has always represented the power of wonder – and racing is one of its most thrilling expressions.”Matt Webster, CEO at Fuse Games
Galactic Racer is the debut release from Fuse Games, a Guildford studio founded by former Criterion Games staff, including chief executive Matt Webster, Criterion's one-time general manager. That pedigree traces back to Burnout and Need for Speed, and the studio's earlier work included vehicle sections built for DICE's Star Wars Battlefront shooters, giving Fuse an unusually direct line to this specific license.
Lucasfilm Games vice president and general manager Douglas Reilly credited that background directly, saying the Fuse team had taken Star Wars' sense of spectacle and "elevated it into a wholly new form of racing adventure." Secret Mode, which is publishing the game, has pitched it internally as a statement release rather than a licensed tie-in built to a deadline.
Where to Watch and Play
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store, with Standard, Deluxe and a physical Collector's Edition on offer at launch. Early reviews leaned positive: Game Informer awarded the launch build 8.5 out of 10, calling it an enthralling and challenging racing roguelite that is hard to put down despite a handful of small frustrations. Other outlets praised the handling model and the game's commitment to its own identity rather than a generic license cash-in, though some flagged the lack of local split-screen as a rough edge for a vehicle game built around chaos and takedowns.
For a studio Webster has described as starting from little more than a small team and a whiteboard idea, a day-one presence across every major platform is itself part of the story the launch trailer is trying to tell.
Official links
Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
