Recently, I was excited to tell you about Star Wars: Beyond Victory, a mixed-reality playset that released October 7 on the Meta Quest 3S and Meta Quest 3. It features three-separate modes: adventure, arcade, and playset, and a brand new, podracing-centric story about a pilot mentored by Sebulba.
Reviews, unfortunately, have not been kind, as Star Wars: Beyond Victory sits at a Metacritic of 54 out of 100. For a frame of reference, that's almost 20 points behind Peppa Pig: World Adventures. Hey, Peppa was a huge part of my kids' childhoods, but that's not hot, Beyond Victory.
Upload VR is not a fan of the constant shifting between VR and MR.
"Piloting a podracer at wild speeds through a Holotable that only becomes as large as your arms can stretch is a deeply flawed idea," Upload's Don Hopper writes. "I can’t see far enough ahead to plan turns, and it's never as thrilling as actually sitting in the cockpit. It’s not awful, but it isn’t what I imagined or hoped for when I learned ILM was making a podracing game. It should have offered a fully immersive option for VR, or at least given players with strong VR legs the ability to switch to an in-cockpit, first-person perspective."
Road to VR's Scott Hayden found the MR overworld "painfully boring" en route to giving it a 65 overall. He did enjoy the short campaign, which apparently clocks in at around two hours. It's a shame, as there's obviously great potential in the seedy world of Star Wars podracing, but it doesn't seem like Star Wars: Beyond Victory has realized it.