Star Wars Galactic Racer is an upcoming arcade-style racing game developed by Fuse Games, featuring customizable characters and vehicles, detailed environments using Unreal Engine 5, and targeting smooth 60fps performance across PS5, Xbox Series S, and PC with advanced upscaling technologies. Launching on October 6th, the game offers diverse vehicle types, dynamic environmental effects, and scalable graphics options to deliver an immersive and technically impressive Star Wars racing experience.
Star Wars Galactic Racer is an upcoming arcade-style racing game developed by Fuse Games, a new studio formed by key personnel from the renowned Criterion Games, known for titles like the Burnout series and Star Wars Battlefront. The game has been in development for three years and is set to release on October 6th. This preview focuses on the base PlayStation 5 build, with additional insights into versions for PS5 Pro, Xbox Series S, and PC. The game promises a fresh take on Star Wars racing, featuring a campaign mode where players can customize characters and vehicles, and explore detailed pre-race paddock areas on foot.
The game is built using Unreal Engine 5, chosen for its scalability across platforms and advanced features. The engine enables highly detailed environments, such as lava caves on Lantana and icy tundras on Ando Prime, with authentic Star Wars assets and materials rendered using photogrammetry and a physically based rendering pipeline. Key UE5 features like Nanite help manage complex terrain geometry, while Lumen global illumination provides dynamic lighting effects, especially noticeable in cave sections with glowing lava and speeder headlights. Screen space reflections are used for reflections, balancing quality and performance at high speeds.
Performance-wise, the game targets a solid 60 frames per second on the base PS5, employing dynamic resolution scaling with Unreal Engine 5’s Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) to maintain sharp visuals around 1440p to 1690p. While mostly stable, frame rate dips occur during intense moments with many racers or explosions, but these are expected to be addressed before launch. The PS5 Pro version will enhance image quality further with Sony’s PSSR upscaler and increased graphical settings, while the Xbox Series S version makes compromises by using Unreal Engine’s Light Mass Probes instead of hardware Lumen for global illumination to maintain 60fps.
On PC, Galactic Racer aims for high-end performance, with reported frame rates of around 150fps on an RTX 4090 using Nvidia’s Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction technologies. The game will support popular upscaling technologies like Nvidia DLSS 4.5, Intel XeSS, and AMD FSR 4, and will offer scalability options to accommodate lower-end hardware, including handheld devices like the Steam Deck. Importantly, the game maintains a consistent internal physics tick rate of 60fps across all platforms to ensure smooth handling and network play, even if frame rates vary externally.
Overall, Star Wars Galactic Racer impresses with its blend of accessible yet deep racing mechanics, featuring four distinct vehicle types and environmental effects that influence engine performance, such as freezing on icy planets or overheating near lava. The wide courses allow players to choose different racing lines and strategies. With its strong technical foundation, attention to detail, and ambitious design, Galactic Racer looks set to deliver a compelling Star Wars racing experience when it launches in October.