Star Wars: Galactic Racer is out on PC, PS5 and Xbox, and at 11:03am Central our tracker counted 11,257 people playing it on Steam. Five minutes later Steam reported 11,514. That is seven hours after the 4am Central unlock, on a Tuesday morning in the US, and it is close to the 12,418 players the other 16 Star Wars games we track on Steam had at the same moment, all of them added together.
Steam reviews sit at 77% positive, which Steam labels "Mostly Positive." That is well below the critics, who have it at 87 on OpenCritic. Most of the gap comes from one PC problem, covered below.
We have not played it yet. This is a launch-day report built on numbers and other people's reports; our own impressions come later this week.
The numbers
| What | Reading | Read at (Central) |
|---|---|---|
| Steam players, our tracker | 11,257 | 11:03am |
| Steam players, Steam's own count | 11,514 | 11:08am |
| Steam user reviews | 77% positive (357 of 461), "Mostly Positive" | 11:03am |
| OpenCritic | 87 top critic average, 96% recommend, 75 critics | 11:06am |
| Metacritic | 88 PS5, 86 Xbox, 85 PC | 11:05am |
| Metacritic user score | Not shown yet | 11:05am |
We don't have the launch peak. Our first reading was at 11am Central, and SteamDB and SteamCharts were not serving the game's chart when we checked. We will have a full first-week curve in our follow-up.
How it compares with Zero Company
Zero Company hit 53,184 on Steam within an hour of its August unlock, so on raw numbers Galactic Racer opened lower. The two are hard to line up. Zero Company unlocked at 10am Central on a Thursday and we caught its first-hour rush; Galactic Racer unlocked at 4am Central and we started counting seven hours later. It also costs $59.99 against Zero Company's $49.99, it is an arcade racer instead of a tactics game, and its crossplay multiplayer pulls in console players our Steam count never sees.
On the same reading, Galactic Racer had more than four times Zero Company's 2,412 and more than three times The Old Republic's 3,324. A fair verdict on the size of this launch needs the evening numbers, and we will run them.
What Steam reviewers like
We read the 159 most recent and most helpful English reviews. The positive ones mostly praise the handling, the speed and the run-based campaign, the same things the critics praised. About a dozen say it runs well, on everything from high-end cards to a laptop where, per a Steam reviewer, it "runs buttery smooth with an integrated MOBILE GPU."
What they are complaining about
You cannot rebind keys or buttons. This is the big one. It came up in 21 of the reviews we read, including 13 of the 33 negative ones, and the two most-upvoted reviews on the store are both about it. The top one comes from a player with nerve damage in both hands who found "no options to change any key binds what-so-ever" and refunded. We found no statement from Fuse Games about adding rebinding as of 11am Central.
Thin on modes. Several reviewers say there is no single race where you just pick a track and vehicle, and no private lobbies for friends. Several Episode I Racer fans say podracing feels like a side dish, with six pods.
Party size. Online parties top out at three. Fuse said on X that it plans to raise that to six "within the first few weeks of launch."
Crashes, for a few. Four or five reviewers report crashes: at launch, while compiling shaders or partway through the campaign. Nobody we read describes a widespread crash wave.
The known issues list
Secret Mode posted an official known issues thread on the Steam forums this morning. The ones most likely to bite:
- Nvidia RTX 50-series cards can crash with Frame Generation and DLSS on.
- On PC, switching apps in Fullscreen can make the screen blink and the system stop responding.
- The game does not always warn you when a save file is corrupted.
- On Steam Deck, the Epic online overlay does not display, so the game looks frozen; press B to back out.
On PS5, Last Word on Gaming reports that Fuse acknowledged a problem stopping some players from buying the game on the PlayStation Store. We could not find the original post or confirm a fix, so if your purchase failed, try again later today. We found no reports of server outages on any platform.
Steam Deck and PC specs
Valve still has not rated the game for Steam Deck. GamingOnLinux tested a Deck OLED and got a mostly steady 30fps on the lowest settings with upscaling, at a visual cost. The Steam page now lists a recommended spec: Core i7-10700 or Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB of RAM, and an RTX 3060 Ti, RX 6700 XT or Arc B580.
Should you buy it today
If you play with a controller on PS5, Xbox or a decent PC, the critics and the Steam reviewers agree on what matters: the racing is very good and the game runs well. Buy the $59.99 Standard Edition and skip the Deluxe.
Wait if you play on keyboard, since rebinding may or may not come. Wait if you are on a Steam Deck, until Valve rates it or the Deck issues are patched. And wait if you want private podracing with friends; that is not in the game today. Steam refunds anything played under two hours, and several reviewers say they already used it.
The launch page and the game hub collect our coverage, and Sunday's launch-eve file covers unlock times. Our own impressions and a first-week numbers piece come later this week.
