Star Wars: Beyond Victory

Star Wars: Beyond Victory is a fantastic addition to the entertainment franchise. I love the combination of MR and VR, but I wish there were more VR action. If you love Star Wars, you'll adore every element of this game!

Die-hard Star Wars fans will find enough here to enjoy the game for a while. More casual fans will probably play the game for a couple of hours and then move on. Star Wars: Beyond Victory is available on the Quest 3 and 3S.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory is a neat experience. The Adventure mode does a good job of mixing together VR and mixed reality while telling a good story in the beloved universe. The racing is novel yet forgiving when you consider the viewpoint, while the Playset mode is pretty neat if you're into posing action figures in semi-ridiculous ways. Unfortunately, the entire experience is fun but pretty short (even by VR standards), making this feel like a fleeting experience.

The fact that Beyond Victory is able to infuse these different gameplay approaches with such a lived-in touch of the Star Wars magic underscores how clever design and effective application of the tech can do wonders for established franchises. Beyond Victory is a fun experiment and showcase for the VR tech that Star Wars fans will find plenty to love about, but hopefully, the developers can take these lessons from this title and build on them in ways that only improve upon a solid bedrock.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory tells a well-executed and personal story that punches above its weight class in terms of both detail and performance, and its full-VR segments feel excellent. Unfortunately, its mixed-reality aspects range from just okay to outright harmful, with the playset mode being insubstantial, and its racing being a complete misuse of the format. Worth it for existing VR and Star Wars fans, but it's not going to create any new fans.

Three unsatisfying modes do not make a full package. A decent story mode is kneecapped by terrible racing, the racing "arcade" mode doesn't have the saving grace of story moments, and the Playset—which could be its own standalone product—is undone by a lack of basic figures and Quest 3's memory restrictions. Hardcore fans will find some fun here, but everyone else is likely to be frustrated by the game's lack of focus and inability to deliver on its own great potential.

An extremely insubstantial Star Wars pod racing themed VR and mixed reality experience, that is technically competent but whose greatest value is in demonstrating the limitations of AR as a concept.