Skip to main content
News

Star Wars: Galactic Racer director talks balancing spectacle with great game feel

Flying around a track in a speeder is an instant player fantasy, but how does Star Wars: Galactic Racer keep us hooked when it wears off?
Alex Hopley Editor UK 19 August 2026

Star Wars: Galactic Racer is a game that's destined to bring Star Wars fans' inner child to life. It's full of fan-favourite characters and maps from various Star Wars eras, and it gives them the chance to race in some iconic vehicles. The game could have leant on nostalgia alone to sell copies, but game director Matt Webster knows that wouldn't have been enough to make a great racing game.

"Arcade isn't an absence of depth. Arcade is jump in, have an incredible moment, instantly feel like you're having a fantasy fulfilment, you're getting excited, and you're getting an audio-visual spectacle, and it's feeling great immediately. And then we have a heap of depth inside how the vehicles control, and the dynamics of the three speeder archetypes, and then of course the pod racer as well," Webster told us in our exclusive interview.

Going beyond that initial moment, Webster says the core design philosophy was favouring the player in order to reward them for peeking under the hood and engaging with the depth the game offers. "If you crash, it's a risk that you've pushed too far. It should feel fair," he said.

When we got to play multiplayer, it was clear that while the game rewarded solid racing, there were sneaky ways for people at the back of the pack to have a chance to catch up, sometimes leading to something like a blue shell moment in Mario Kart. "You have those moments of 'someone beat me' or 'something happened to me in that race,' but it felt fair," Webster said.

Check out our full interview below for more details on Star Wars: Galactic Racer's multiplayer and single-player modes:

Editor UK Alex Hopley covered the video game industry for Gamereactor, from new announcements and launches to the business behind them. He also wrote on tech, film and entertainment, and his coverage wasn't tied to any one region.
Full profile Gamereactor author since 2023 · 9,411 published articles
Why trust Gamereactor
23 Editions Each with its own newsroom and its own scores.
1998 Publishing since Independently owned for the whole of it.
100% Hands-on Written from time with the game, never press material.
1–10 Network Score Every edition’s score, averaged and shown.