Star Wars: Galactic Racer is not a podracing game. But it is a game about podracing… and a lot more. Perhaps more than the developers actually intended. If you’ll indulge me a little, I’ll unpack this. 

Yeah, it’s a pretty good game 

First, Galactic Racer is a pretty darn good arcade racing game. It’s an easy recommendation if you’ve ever enjoyed a game like F-Zero or Wipeout, or of course the original Episode 1 Racer from way back in the 90s. It’s got a decent roguelike singleplayer mode, competitive multiplayer, lots of customization options, some very pretty graphics, and most essentially, an incredible feeling of speed. 

Galactic Racer trailer

I especially like the little sci-fi touches that make this game more than just a set of cars and tracks. Before each race you can do a little quick-time button-tapping event to warm up your hovercar’s parts. It feels very intentionally like the pre-launch checks of a spaceship, or indeed, a futuristic racer. Your dangerous “ramjet” speed boost can overheat and explode, but on an ice planet it can go much longer. Very cool. 

But what’s engaged me most is the story mode. And that’s surprising, because the story itself isn’t very good. Not that I’m disappointed — you don’t buy racing games to get enthralled by a narrative. On the surface it’s an extremely simple little tale. You’re a pilot who’s just out of prison on a trumped-up charge, some investors rope you into a racing league of questionable legitimacy, and there’s a rich guy asshole who’s doing rich guy asshole things. Your motivation is to knock him off his high speeder bike. 

Star Wars fans are eating well

There’s a lot of fodder for the Star Wars fans. The story takes place at a very particular point in the sprawling Star Wars timeline, just after Return of the Jedi, when the Empire is freshly fallen and there’s a big power vacuum with a lot of jockeying to fill it. Apparently at some point after The Phantom Menace — the movie that put the pulse-pounding sci-fi update to Ben Hur’s chariot race in the cultural zeitgeist — the Empire outlawed the sport of podracing. So at the start of Galactic Racer, you very pointedly do not engage in podracing. Instead you get car-style landspeeders, bike-style speeder bikes, and “skim speeders.” This third and entirely new category is tougher and slower than a bike, but faster and more maneuverable than a car. It’s like a podracer, only…not. 

The thing is, basically every character in this game is either one of your fellow racers, or someone intimately involved in the sport. Your mechanic, your manager, your various financial backers. Everyone loves racing. This gives the dialogue and interactions some flavor that might otherwise be missing. 

While I started the game mostly skipping the interactions in between each leg of the race, I eventually got to know my fellow racers. Like memetic mama’s boy alligator guy Biddy Blas, or rookie prodigy Goli, whose species is mute, so their friendly droid O2-RO speaks for them. My favorite is Fola Kanjen, a racer from a farming planet who wants nothing more than speed and excitement. Yes, those are some extremely Star Wars names. 

So you’ve got a cast full of characters who love racing…but no podracing to be seen. Podracers are so fast and maneuverable that the danger in piloting one makes it almost impossible to hold a real, organized race.  But it’s immediately apparent that there’s a legacy of podracing in the Star Wars universe, to more or less the same degree that there is in the real world. Everyone remembers podracing, and even those characters who are too young know of it and speak of it in reverent tones, recalling specific races and racers from approximately 30 years ago. And hey, would you look at that, Episode 1 and its accompanying video games are almost 30 years old here in the real world, too. 

“I wanted racing back, the way it was, the way it should be!” says the game’s opening narration. “The audience has been dying to see a real podracer in the league. That is to say, they’re dying to see me,” says Kestar Bool, the rich jerkoff who’s executed a hostile takeover of the league.

Talking to these characters about the “glory days of podracing” feels a lot like listening to real motorsports fans. When a car nut talks about the Nissan Skyline GT-R R32 and gives it a nickname like “Godzilla,” or recalls with fondness the rapid advancements of a particular decade of rally racing, it gives off the same vibes. I don’t know enough about real racing to speak with authority here. But as an outsider, it sure seems like the developers were aiming for a very specific vibe, and hit it right on target. 

“The glory days” of the prequels 

I can’t help but analyze this through a broader media lens, too. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you probably know that it’s been very up-and-down since Disney acquired the franchise. The movie Episodes 7-9 had a reaction that was mixed at best, with a definite downturn on the final, 40-year cap to the “Skywalker saga.” The other tie-ins have ranged from surprisingly good (Rogue One and Andor) to fine, I guess (The Mandalorian, Solo, Ahsoka) to downright awful (The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, and the latest movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu). 

At the same time, people who were kids or teenagers when the much-maligned prequel series — of which the Episode 1 podrace was an unambiguous highlight — are fueling a new wave of nostalgia for those three movies. Which feels strange to me, since the prequels and George Lucas’s storytelling became a punchline after Revenge of the Sith. 

But hey, I’m a Star Trek fan, so I have no room to judge anyone for liking questionable sci-fi entries. “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil” is at about the same level as “What does God need with a starship?” in terms of retrospective cringe.

So is it any wonder that Galactic Racer seems inordinately fond of podracing? And perhaps more importantly, of the Episode 1 Racer game that came out on the N64 and other platforms twenty-seven years ago? That game bucked the trend of the 90s and early 2000s, when any movie tie-in game was likely to be shovelware at best. But I think it’s fair to say that the original podracing game is held in high esteem, with over 3 million copies sold, more than any singular F-Zero or Wipeout game by a wide margin.

It’s likely that few if any of Galactic Racer‘s dev team had a hand in the original. But assuming the team has people in their 20s through 50s, I’d bet that the majority of them played it at some point. Here I’ll point out that Zero Company, another well-regarded Star Wars game that released just a few months ago, uses the prequels’ Clone Wars setting for tactical strategy.

Now this is podracing

It’s no surprise (and no spoiler, since it’s in the trailer) that eventually you get your hands on a podracer in Galactic Racer, shortly after an older and more wrinkled Sebulba shows up. The bad guy of the original podracing sequence becomes the Mickey to your Rocky, helping you recover from the back foot and take on the villain in a junker that your team slowly brings back to life. 

You’ll get to relive those glory days with sequences that are essentially short, remastered versions of the Tatooine track from the movie and Episode 1 Racer. Plus you can take your cobbled-together podracer out on the new tracks and carry over your roguelike part builds to the much, much faster format. A handful of Phantom Menace racers return, a gallery of Glup Shittos that the biggest prequel fans will immediately recognize. The difference in these racing machines is immediately evident, and it’s such a sharp distinction that the game never mixes podracers with the other three categories of hovercraft. The capstone of every roguelike run is a white-knuckle one-on-one podrace, to dethrone the billionaire jerkoff who’s making his crippling insecurity everyone else’s problem. 

The story in Galactic Racer isn’t much to write about, some colorful characters notwithstanding. Seeing Sebulba, a barely-notable antagonist, suddenly become a surly and lovable old coot a la Doc Hudson, is something I wasn’t expecting to enjoy so much. But it’s the metatextual story that really engrossed me. It’s a narrative about people in love with a sport, and making it personal and meaningful in spite of the money and power poisoning it from the top down.

Surely anyone who loves a sport, from racing to soccer to little league, can relate. Ditto for fans of Star Wars, or any property that’s been passed around the oligarch poker table.

Underneath the hood

This is a game very much in conversation with its predecessors, and even with Star Wars in general. I don’t know if the writers for Galactic Racer intended to tell a tale about a massive media franchise that looks better in the rearview mirror. And they certainly weren’t aiming for anything broader that one could mention in the same context — say, a gaming hardware space that’s being devoured by billionaire jerkoffs determined to turn “AI” into an infinite money glitch, at the expense of the environment and the economy. Or a game publishing industry that seems to viscerally hate everyone who actually makes games, and systematically deny them any kind of security or dignity. Certainly not.

(Galactic Racer is developed by Fuse Games, an apparently new British team under the Sumo Group, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Tencent for the last four years. Tencent, for a variety of reasons, sucks bantha poodoo.) 

Galactic Racer is great fun. It’s not without its faults — the tracks can be a little bland and lacking in clear direction, especially compared to the old, cartoony sci-fi tracks in Episode 1 Racer. The lack of a split-screen mode (even on the PlayStation and Xbox) might sting a lot for those trying to recapture the feeling of the N64 original. But since Nintendo and Sony haven’t seen fit to give us new F-Zero or Wipeout games in multiple decades, I’d say it’s about as good as it gets in this small but interesting niche. 

And if you get something more out of Galactic Racer’s story than what’s actually written on the pages of the script, that’s just a nice bonus.

Cool stuff from around the web:

• I’m going to signal boost the thesis of last week’s episode of The Full Nerd: Nvidia doesn’t need to care about PC gaming.
• Epic said it slop-coded the latest version of the Game Store to be faster. Then Valve made Steam faster with actual programmers. Tim Sweeney continues to get dunked on by pretty much the entire industry.
• Speaking of AAA nonsense, check out this “Triple-A Minesweeper,” a free game you can play in your browser. Be sure to turn RTX on.

• You can get the new Googlebook OS running on at least some Chromebooks, an interesting exercise if you want to check out the new platform without spending a thousand bucks.
• If you use both Xbox Game Pass and a Steam Deck, you need to check out this open-source tool bringing the former to the latter.

Game Pick of the week: Burnout Paradise

If you’re in the mood for some arcade racing but $60 for a new Star Wars game is a bit rich, then check out this certified classic. Racing fans know Criterion makes some of the best entries out there, and Burnout Paradise is generally considered the pinnacle of its long-running series. A lot of its DNA — particularly the elimination races that knock out the slowest car — can be seen in Galactic Racer.

Nearly 20 years later, Burnout Paradise is a bit of a 2000s relic, with an open-world setup that was all the rage at the time and seems a bit unnecessary now (unless you like Forza‘s map system, I guess). But it nails the sense of speed and splashy feel, where smashing your rivals into heaps of scrap is half the fun. This is essentially a Hot Wheels set in video game form.

Burnout Paradise Remastered is $20 on Steam, but can be found much cheaper elsewhere. It’s also on Xbox Game Pass.

That’s all for this week. To get my editorials, news picks, and game recommendations delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up for Boost Mode on the PCWorld Newsletter hub. Also check out The Full Nerd for more enthusiast-focused goodies, Prompt Mode for AI tips, Safe Mode to keep your PC and gadgets secure, and Smart Mode to boost your productivity.

According to SteamDB, a staggering 21,252 games were released on Steam in 2025—roughly 58 new games every single day, and a 15 percent increase over 2024. With that kind of competition, how can smaller indie games possibly get noticed? You probably heard about Balatro and Dragon’s Dogma 2, but what about a mashup of old-school Zelda and a shoot-em-up?

It’s becoming impossible to parse all but the biggest triple-A releases (many of which aren’t exactly stellar) and the most virulent of social media hits. How do you search and find new games in a landscape where you simply can’t hope to see everything? That’s the problem that We Love Every Game (or We HEART Every Game as its logo goes) aims to solve.

A product of a teeny-tiny Boston startup called Totally Human Media, I fell in love with the tool during a recent Steam sale and wrote it up here on PCWorld. The company reached out to me to ask if I wanted to go deeper, and I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. I wanted to find out the root problems of current game discoverability on the PC and other platforms, and what we as gamers can do about it, how developers can get their games out, and all that jazz.

Totally Human Media CEO Ichiro Lambe and head of marketing Matt Martindale joined me over a video call to chat.

Editor’s note (October 2026): We Love Every Game continues to expand its Steam discovery tools, with features including daily game spotlights, a game explorer, a news feed, and newsletters highlighting overlooked releases. The following interview was originally conducted in June 2025.

Michael Crider, PCWorld: Ichiro, on the website for Totally Human Media, it says that you have a background in game development. Can you tell me about that?

Ichiro Lambe: So I’ve been in the industry for about thirty years. I founded a couple of companies, one became Sony Online [Entertainment] Denver, the next was an indie studio called Dejobaan Games. We created award-winning stuff with a Guinness World Record for breaking Steam…and over the years I’ve consulted for a number of companies, and helped launch umpteen games. And in 2018 Valve approached me to help them with games discovery.

So I co-founded something called Steam Labs over at Valve. I was an external consultant, random moonlighting dude, and for a few years we just sort of did a bunch of stuff around games discovery. And early last year I closed down my indie studio, because it’s fashionable, right? And I founded Totally Human Media and We Love Every Game to solve the discovery problem.

PCWorld: And was it specifically your experience with that indie studio and over many years that told you, “This is a problem that we need to address?”

Lambe: Oh, absolutely. So I’ve been doing discovery-related stuff for about ten years. I had a Twitter bot back in the day called Microtrailers where every time a Steam game launched, it would cut a six-second micro-trailer and put that on Twitter. May Twitter rest in peace!

I knew the Valve/Steam team over the years and that’s part of why they brought me on to help them. But bluntly, the only reason why I had to close my indie studio was because the games launched there were generally, you know, thumbs up, but they sank without a trace.

https://bsky.app/profile/weloveeverygame.bsky.social/post/3lsbnv2ajb52a

PCWorld: So for We Love Every Game, what is your standard for what constitutes a good game, one that the tool can recommend, if you’re prepared to share that? From what I can tell it seems to require at least an 80 percent or higher positive review on Steam. Can you share any other parameters, green flags or red flags that developers should be aiming for?

Lambe: We’re trying a really simple heuristic right now, which is 80 percent are positive player reviews or higher, and I think it’s 30 reviews or more. And for something like the Steam Summer Sale, obviously a game has to be greater than $0 or it’s not really on sale. However, I think our greater mission is to make sure that every gamer finds their next favorite game, and also that every game is able to find an audience of people who would want it.

So there are lots of games out there that don’t fit a concrete criterion, but it has many people who love it. I don’t like it when recommendation engines try to be personalized, because algorithms get it wrong, but we don’t necessarily want a review score to stand in the way of [a game] finding you.

Matt Martindale: I think in the future we’ll be trying to find ways that people can say, you know, I like certain genres. I’m an RTS kid myself. But there are things within that genre, what is that thing that they enjoy about it, and how do we then link games together? For example, my classic line [to demonstrate this] is, like, Pokemon and Elden Ring are very similar. They have difficulty gates, you’ve got to train up and beat that.

So how do you serve that as a need? Unless there’s someone who’s written an article or a video on YouTube saying, “Is it that thing from that game,” there’s no way. And there’s so many misconnections for gamers, I find. Like, how many Fortnite players have the perfect game that they’ve just not migrated across to? So that’s the foundation, how to help people find those little connections and move across.

For example, I’m fairly certain that base building, which is what I enjoy in real-time strategies, is why I enjoy Factorio and Satisfactory. Platforms don’t really have the space or the time to be building that kind of interconnection.

PCWorld: Your “About” page on We Heart Every Game says you want to figure out a way to cover “every single bloody video game on the web” in videos, newsletters, and so forth. Tell me what that looks like for you.

Lambe: The way that people find and buy games typically follows the sales funnel model, where you have to first become aware of a game. I see it somewhere. Then they are in the interest phase where they learn about a game. It’s like your favorite journalist writes about it, “Ah, yes, I trust Michael.” And then you get to the bottom of the sales funnel, can I buy it, is it the right price?

I think the bottom of the funnel is solved. Steam, Nintendo eShop, you know, you can buy a game, you can play it, that’s no problem, perfect. The middle of the funnel, is hurting, but there’s a lot of good content. Once you know about a game, you can learn about it…what I think is missing for most games is that initial awareness. So if we can say, “Hey, here are games that, based on your Steam library or these categories [you selected], and you signed up for a newsletter, we can tell you sort of very lightly what might be interesting to you. Why might it be interesting. And here’s how you can find out about it more in a more substantial fashion.

PCWorld: I’m gonna be honest, the task that you’ve set for yourself seems overwhelming, dare I say impossible. How do you scale that up to, say, 20 or 30,000 new games to hit Steam in a year?

Lambe: So automation has gotten better over the years, and it’s gotten worse. So we have like generative AI can spit out a bunch of shit about everything. But I think that we can also use these tools to sort of summarize what’s interesting or relevant to you about a game. If we go to ChatGPT and we’re just like, look, encapsulate this game in a few sentences and then I’ll link to the Steam store page, or we’ll try to find articles and in-depth streams, so forth and so on, we can automate that at scale and use that existing information about the games, what’s largely out there already.

PCWorld: So you would trust generative AI to summarize human-generated content about games, and then present that to people as a way of informing them?

Lambe: I don’t trust it at all! I think it does a highly variable job of accuracy. Do I want glue on my pizza? No. However, I do think it’s currently good enough so that it can sort of tease you, and say, “Look, this game might be good for you. Here are a few reasons why.”

Martindale: We’re at the top of that [sales] funnel, we’re using it as a way to help people find little snippets of that game…we’re building sort of framework templates for the content that goes out there, so that there’s a structure in what we produce using it. If it makes a mistake, it’s more likely something we’ve done wrong with the template, not something in [the content]. These are smaller bite-sized bits of content, we’re not trying to eat an entire Wikipedia article and spit that out…So it’s always quite focused, and not like trying to matter too many things into a very small box that that when AI is going to trip over and, yeah, start inventing its own realities.

Lambe: What we have upcoming is, we try to convey what’s relevant to you about a game in multiple ways. So for instance, if you were looking at it [like], I play Deep Rock Galactic. How are these games like Deep Rock Galactic? And it might be able to pick out, like, it’s for four player, Co Op, PvE, right?

PCWorld: So if you’re building a tool from the ground up, based on all these goals, would you say that you are hoping to expose all of the buttons and all the levers that you can to a user to say, “This is why we’re making these recommendations. Please tweak these to your to your liking to make it better”?

Lambe: It’s sort of scary to give people all of the controls, because I think we can overwhelm them. But wouldn’t it be really neat if you you’re a casual user, and you can just say, “Algorithm, I’m going to surf with whatever you recommend.” Or maybe you’re a little bit more of a mid-core gamer, and you go in and you pull out genres and pull in genres. Or maybe you’re an incredible prosumer, and you can go in and say, “Look, I explicitly want only games that are hidden object, and cats,” tag, and and do that.

PCWorld: Do you think you can build that for all of those disparate users?

Lambe: The tech behind that part is pretty straightforward. Like you can go to SteamDB right now, and you can just say, it must have a hidden object tag and a cat tag. I think the tricky thing will be to figure out how to co-construct this with gamers, so as not to overwhelm them. We will tell you in a few months whether that works or not.

PCWorld: User interface is not easy.

Martindale: On user interface, like, TikTok. Have they got the best option for this? Or do we need something where it’s a bit more speedy and quicker to get through things? We’re still probably an early stage to share anything, but we are working on a single view where you would go as if you were to scroll, say, a Reddit or Twitter feed, and you can just work your way through in one view.

PCWorld: On the Totally Human page, you said you want to do something similar for all entertainment media. Yes. Do you think that’s possible?

Lambe: I think we’re doing it…on a Friday night when I’m sort of relaxing with my wife and we put the kids into their beds. Kind of want to be let’s just watch something and to enjoy it like right? And so I have a need for we have the need for just being able to scroll through a bunch of stuff and say, “ah, that let’s try it” without having to go through the Netflix interface and to play the first 15 minutes of an episode.

The way we’re approaching it, is to give users that top of funnel stuff where it’s just like you walk into a farmer’s market, and you see all these wonderful things, and you can just taste them really, really quickly. And we give you that sort of literally, you know, this one-second hint of what Veronica Mars is all about. And then you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to investigate that.

So, you know, can we do it? I don’t know. Talk to me in 2027 [when we’re] expanding to books, music, movies and television. But the how is, we’re learning a bunch of lessons from games.

PCWorld: This is a very broad question, and I would understand if you would just decline it. Can this be profitable? And is that a goal for you?

Lambe: The answer is that we are investor-backed, and therefore it has to be. I think there are a number of platforms that demonstrate how you can do something like that. Any consumer-facing platform has the ability to monetize, and hopefully in a not-enshittified way.

PCWorld: That’s very gratifying to hear!

Lambe: Oh my gosh. It breaks my heart every time something wonderful that I use turns into this weird dystopian thing.

Martindale: I guess for the developers, the option to be able to target people based on their interests has never been really bad. Even platforms like Steam, they don’t necessarily do that themselves as part of their system, but they’re not necessarily set up for “I’m after people who play this very specific pattern.”

And I think when we’ve talked to a lot of marketing teams and studios in the space, the problem is they have to use very generic tools to target a very sort of a niche audience. Google doesn’t tell if you’re a real-time strategy player, like that’s not an option…Not necessarily like a long-term campaign, but just have that loud thunder clap moment on their launch, focus it around a specific time. And it instead of it being this invisible space where they put their money in and then they just hope that they see the fallout. We’ll just make it visible, because we’re hopefully bringing joy to the users through this as well.

Lambe: I think that if we do it [monetization] by saying, “Look, this user has said specifically that they want, gladiatorial management RPGs, and your game is a gladiatorial management RPG. We don’t have to guess. We don’t have to do any weird fingerprinting, nothing invasive. Just put a sponsorship thing in the feed! And that seems harmonious rather than weird.

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We Love Every Game does plenty to spread awareness for games outside of its primary tool, from social media profiles to YouTube videos, to newsletters, to dedicated sub-sites for Steam sales.