Star Wars Episode I: Racer (Dreamcast) review "Loving a Game That Doesn’t Quite Work"

My love of Star Wars Episode One Racer seems, on paper, unjustifiable.

I have a laundry list of complaints:

- Limited Game Modes
- Maddeningly Repetitive Dialogue
- No Race Variety
- Speed + Low Draw Distance = Crash
- Inconsistent Track Mechanics
- Creativity Hamstrung By License
- and more!

For a racing game, already shackled with being a tie-in to what I understand to be the worst Star Wars movie, these complaints should spell doom. And yet, I have played this game on basically every device it's been released on. Every few years since it first released on the PC, Dreamcast, and N64 in 1999/2000, I've gone back to this game, over and over, and when the HD ports hit the Switch and PlayStation in 2020, I played them too.

I can't blame it on nostalgia alone. It was one of the first games I played for the Sega Dreamcast, a console I hold most fondly in my heart, and I can't help but think about Episode One Racer whenever I think about the system. But I also had Blue Stinger and Ready 2 Rumble back then and, while I've played both of them since, I only needed five minutes to scratch those nostalgic itches. When I play Episode One Racer, I don't drop in for a moment: I stay until I the credits.

You move real fast in these pod racers - upward of 800+ units of whatever this faraway galaxy uses to measure velocity. If Episode One Racer excels at anything it is how well it conveys a sense of speed, particularly when the player's perspective is set as either first-person or the closest third-person setting. Texture helps a lot here. In open areas, horizontal rock striations on canyon walls and vertically-oriented ground textures create a strong motion parallax effect, which helps convey the sense of speed. When the tracks shift from wide to narrow, the technique is even more pronounced.

The problem with all this speed is that there are times the game engine can't render the area ahead of you far enough, fast enough. You navigate tracks that are far more rigorous than you might anticipate from a licensed game marketed to children. This can lead to moments where obstacles or a narrow passage you need to enter are shrouded behind fog until what feels like the last second. This is only an issue in a handful of races, but it's a limitation that could have been designed around.

Track design is similarly hit or miss. Tournament Mode, the game's version of a career mode and basically the only mode it offers, takes you through a variety of different planets. Ando Prime is an ice world that has you winding through frozen canyons and across vast ice fields. Mon Gazza snakes players through industrial facilities and active mining operations. Ord Ibanna is a massive track seemingly floating in the sky, Aquilaris takes you under water, and you'll even race through Anakin Skywalker's desert home of Tatooine.

The developers have all their biomes covered and do some commendable work. There are quite a few branching paths on almost every level, often rewarding players who can manage a risky turn with a shortcut to an easier route. The tracks also iterate on themselves - you'll revisit all of the planets as you move through the podracing circuit, but you'll never race the same track. Released during an era where many developers opted to pad their track counts by mirroring tracks, it would have been easy and excusable for the developers to do the same here. Instead, they built upon what they created, offering players more variety and a greater challenge.

I do have a few gripes here. There are rough sections of every track, particularly in the later stages that require much more rigorous turning and braking skill, that just aren't well designed. There are times when barrier textures match too closely to the textures behind them, making it hard to see that a turn is fast approaching. The game is inconsistent with environmental collisions - crashing into a fallen tree branch will sometimes vault you into the air and sometimes cause your podracer to explode and there's no way to know what outcome you're going to get without crashing into it. I remain deeply confused as to why the surface you're driving over impacts the handling of the podracer, which floats above the ground. Why does it slide around on ice?

These complaints are minor. By far and away the single worst part of any track are zero gravity corridors appear in a handful of levels. They're a mess. During these sections, you lose control of your craft. These sections of track are littered with massive floating chunks of rock, some of which are half the size of the tube that you're hurtling through, and all you can hope to do is sort of nudge your podracer out of the way. Worst of all? On too many occasions, when the track shifts back to normal gravity and the game hands control back over, the game will crash you into a wall. All these years later, I rarely finish a race that has these sections without wrecking.

When I was less experienced with the game and needed every second to eke out wins, losing a race through what felt like no fault of my own risked a controller getting launched into the floor. The stakes are actually high here - winning matters. If you want to get very far, you must upgrade your podracer, and to upgrade your podracer, you need to win races. You have the option when starting a race to choose how the purse is distributed, from a fair distribution among the first-third place finishers to winner takes all for those who want to bet on themselves. You can replay races as much as you'd like, but you only get one chance to make money from them. An aggressive autosave prevents scum saving. Losing out on earnings you'll need to successfully progress not due to skill, but due to draw distance, muddy textures, and half-baked zero gravity sections sucks.

Do I even like this game? Of course. The game is flawed, but there is some ambition on display. It's intense. The races are high stakes. The sense of speed is thrilling. And unlike a lot of licensed games, it actually takes some chances, even if those chances are limited to level design and not gameplay variety. It isn't a great game. It's probably not a good one. But twenty years after release, I just spent a week grinding out first place finishes on all twenty-five levels. That has to count for something.

Community review by justjess (March 20, 2026) Jessica Wadleigh writes creative non-fiction from Portland, Ore. She runs zines + things, a literary zine press publishing thirty titles. You can find more of Jessica's work online at zinesandthings.com or @zinesandthings on Instagram.