Star Wars: Beyond Victory somehow makes VR podracing boring, and I don’t understand how

Star Wars: Beyond Victory has the makings of a perfect Star Wars buffet and a contender for one of the best VR games of recent times.

The promise of a VR story delving into the previously one-inch deep lore of podracing is enticing – especially to someone for whom the prequel trilogy was a hallmark of their childhood.

Podracing not only provides the opportunity for exhilarating VR gameplay, but gives storytellers the chance to expand on characters like Sebulba – a key antagonist of the Phantom Menace, who we only spend about 5 minutes with before he's benched in favor of a dual-blade-wielding Sith – and explore the seedy underworld that would facilitate this dangerous and deadly sport.

After plating up, however, you realise Beyond Victory's buffet has gone stale, and there’s not nearly enough of it to satiate your hunger.

Beyond Boring

Like a growing number of titles this generation, Star Wars: Beyond Victory blends virtual and mixed reality elements in its gameplay and storytelling. Unfortunately, every segment you'd want to be in VR is instead relegated to MR, and the remaining first-person segments left me wishing there wouldn't be more.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset | Launch Trailer | Meta Quest - YouTube

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Effectively cutscenes, the VR sections have you mostly standing around in one of a few tiny locations that you can hardly explore, with the occasional ‘puzzle’ to solve – tedious minigames where you use tools to fix up vehicles, but which require next to no thought to work out.

Everything else plays out in MR via a virtual table you can place in your room. This includes exploration of more expansive spaces (though the exploration wasn't super enjoyable, so I always just made a beeline for the objective) and podracing.

Yes, that's right. In this VR podracing game, you never sit in a podracing cockpit; instead, you look down at the virtual table as you race through a track using your controllers to accelerate, steer, and boost your podracer from a bird's-eye view.

While somewhat enjoyable, the simplistic podracing gameplay feels like it was lifted from a mediocre mobile game – right down to the table offering only a limited view of what's ahead, like a smaller phone screen restricting your vision.

Oh, and there’s only three podraces – and one car chase. You can replay them in arcade mode with unlockable characters, but there's only so much enjoyable replayability to be extracted from repeating the same few tracks over and over.

A Star Wars Short Story

A common theme for Star Wars: Beyond Victory is that its ingredients sound an awful lot more delicious than the final concoction.

Story-wise, things start well. You have a podracer desperate to become a champion to honor his friend, allies who support him but who believe podracing is a vile sport and are willing to face arrest (or worse) to stand up for their beliefs, and Sebulba's criminal crew – led by the former podracing champion looking to raise a champion of his own, and also pull him down into his villainous activities.

The issue here is that the game is far too short – I finished it in about an hour. You don't spend long enough with any of these factions to do anything more than rush through cliché story beats and conflicts that start and resolve in mere minutes.

I would love to have seen our protagonist Volo evolve more gradually over a longer story. Perhaps seeing his racing style adapt to be more aggressive across a series of races to reflect him turning into a true member of Sebulba's crew before eventually standing up for his friends.

Or heck, give us some kind of basic choice-based story for different endings and race abilities based on who we side with.

That way, at least the short experience could be replayable a few times to get different outcomes, and make this game feel more worthwhile.

Unfortunately, lackluster gameplay and story left me frustrated at the time I'd spent reviewing this game – with one of my favorite moments being when the credits rolled and I could finally go back to Hades 2 on my Nintendo Switch 2.

A single star in the night

There was nowhere else in my review to work this in, but I also want to talk about the playset feature. So I'm tacking it on the end here.

This alternative to the campaign and arcade modes is a full MR experience that allows you to move, scale, and place 3D models of Star Wars characters and vehicles in your home to construct static dioramas. You can even add explosive effects to bring your models to life.

I did think the models were well-crafted – with a good level of detail that works with the sculptures at tiny all the way up to human scale – however, while it would be a neat add-on to an already good game, it doesn’t do enough to save Beyond Victory in my books.

If you’re a Star Wars mega fan and see Beyond Victory on sale for a heavily discounted price, then I think playset does just enough to be worth playing around with – it helped me feel like a kid again playing with action figures.

Otherwise, this is still a Star Wars game worth skipping over.

Should you play Star Wars: Beyond Victory

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

Accessibility

For everything negative I’ve had to say about Star Wars: Beyond Victory, the game is quite accessible by VR’s standards.

You can enjoy the experience entirely seated, you can turn on settings like teleportation movement and screen shake to make the few VR segments less motion sickness-inducing if you’re still new to the medium, and the mostly mixed reality gameplay is even better for managing your motion sickness.

You could even play the game with only one controller if you need to. I used both, but all of the controls are doubled up across each handset, so you could put one down and still have every button you’d need.

How I reviewed Star Wars: Beyond Victory

I played this game on my Meta Quest 3, using a Kiwi design battery strap and controller grips. I played through the entire story from start to finish in two sessions (as I hadn’t charged my Quest 3 up before diving in for the first time) after completing the tutorial. Afterwards, I went straight into arcade mode and then spent a bit of time in playset mode.

I completed a few achievements to unlock some bonus racers for the arcade, and models for my playset, but decided to call it quits after no more than two and a half hours with this title, as I had sampled everything it had to offer.

First reviewed October 2025