Podrace Playtime: ILM Goes Mixed Reality With ‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory” (The NoPro Review)

Star Wars: Beyond Victory A Mixed Reality Playset is a mouthful of a title for the latest release from Industrial Light & Magic for the Meta Quest 3 & 3S.

“Playset,” however, is an accurate description for the release, as Beyond Victory presents three modes of play for its $20 price tag.

In “Adventure” players are invited to take up the mantle of Volo Bolus, an up and coming podracer who is recruited by Sebulba — the podracing champion who young Anakin Skywalker bested in The Phantom Menace — to front an operation that isn’t exactly a legitimate racing concern. Along the way you race pods, meet one of the most intimidating Hutts in the galaxy, and meet a few others who orbit the dangerous world of podracing.

“Arcade” takes the racing levels, some of which are more chase sequences, from Adventure mode and lets players replay them as various characters who pilot different vehicles with special features. Each vehicle is unlockable through various challenges in Arcade mode, encouraging repeat play to unlock them all. It plays out on a virtual table top which floats in the middle of your room in Mixed Reality, so that you see the real world all around the slice of the virtual one. Depending on where you put the table — you can drag it around and resize it — this can create a rather surreal juxtaposition with the action.

“Playset” turns Beyond Victory’s assets into a toxbox full of action figures, vehicles, weapons, decorative elements, and special effects which can then be placed around your own room in Mixed Reality mode. Want to have a life sized R2-D2 sitting in your corner? You can do that! Want to set up an action scene on your desk with virtual 1/12th scale figures, maybe even mixed in with real action figures? You can do that! (There’s even helpful scale reminders on the resizing tool.

Of course, this being an ILM production what’s of most interest is that HOW of it all.

The “how” of Adventure mode is the most complex, as Beyond Victory shifts between four styles: the first person VR style that will be familiar to those who played Vader Immortal and Tales From the Galaxy’s Edge, a third-person perspective played on a virtual tabletop where you guide Volo around larger environments, a cut-scene version of that which hijacks control of the camera from the player to play out predetermined scenes, and the podracing sequences which also play out on the table.

The adventure itself is fairly quick, more of a TV episode than a full feature length story, playing out across three race & chase sequences and the story moments in between. What we get in first person is very well polished, with writing and animation that shows the ILM team hasn’t lost a step from their previous efforts. In fact given how short the adventure is, the team does a fantastic job of conveying who the core characters as the tale unfolds. If anything, as we reached the end I felt like we had just gotten to know Volo and was ready to really start getting into his life. But then, we were done with all that.

I guess there’s something to be said for the episodic nature of Vader Immortal, which let revisit that story every few months.

A Matter of Perspective

One place I struggled some, even getting a twinge of ye old motion wobbles, was with the cut scenes that played out in third person.

On the one hand I can see why the team chose to use the virtual table for playing out the cut-scenes, as when it works it feels like you’re watching toys come to life acting out a scene. They’re also afforded the ability to zoom in and give more nuanced performances in the animation this way. Yet the jump cutting between views remained disorienting to me no matter how many times it happened, sparking a bit of a queasy feeling when it did.

I’m not particularly susceptible to motion sickness, so I’m curious as to how this would impact those who are. I did find myself wishing that I could control the camera for the cut scenes, determining for myself if I wanted the close-up or not.

While I do think the virtual table as a performance space is a viable platform, future use of the table might do well to either be locked to a perspective for a given scene or set up to allow the player to control the camera. I know that usually helps me if I’m having trouble with scale shifts.

This Is Podracing

Let’s talk about the podracing, since that’s the heart of Beyond Victory in literally every sense.

I’ve never been good at podracing. I say this as someone who put in a good chunk of hours on the old Star Wars: Racer game that came out around Episode One and which did so much to make podracing a thing beyond the movies. There’s a fantastic franticness to podracing, and the sequences in the game and the arcade mode do a good job of capturing the sense of careening nearly out of control.

The virtual table top worked better for this than I expected from watching video trailers and seeing stills. Although one always wants a little *more* in terms of being able to look down the track to see what’s coming. As someone who has always been better at flying games than driving games its hard for me to make a real call on whether the third person perspective slice really truly works. I will say that the more I played the more I could feel my way through the levels, although I also felt like maybe things weren’t moving quite as fast as I’d like them to.

Then again, any faster and I think I’d wind up crashing more.

As time went on I was able to feel myself in a decent state of flow with racing elements of the game, although I never quite mastered the balance of observing the external dashboard with floats above the end of the virtual table top and keeping an eagle eye on my racer. I think I would have liked something that foregrounded those essential UI elements a bit more so that the info I needed didn’t pull me away from the racer… or maybe I just need to figure out the exact angle to observe the table from.

The Play’s The Thing

Maybe the most exciting mode, for those of us who never lost our penchant for playing with toys, is the Playset.

The sheer variety of shenanigans one can get up to with posable, variable scaled figures and vehicles complete with special effects, is almost mind boggling.

Blasters snap into character’s hands, and characters snap into pilot seats with the push of button when the two objects are properly scaled. A room can be littered with virtual toys, which can be easily set up to match any real toys you might have in your space.

In some ways, this is what I’ve always wanted.

Ground vehicles can be piloted around the room, responding realistically — i.e. crashing into — real world objects that Meta’s Spatial Data recognizes. The only bummer there being that this is a fully one-player experience, as we’re not quite there on a platform level for letting two players inhabit the same mixed reality space.

That, however, is on Meta and not ILM. Spending time with Beyond Victory has made me want that kind of experience more than any other mixed reality software so far.

Of course, a lot of the elements in the toybox are gated as unlockables behind in-game challenges, meaning that to get the full set of toys one will need to replay certain sequences. In a longer game this prospect would be tedious, but Beyond Victory is a tight enough experience (unlike this review, ha!) that the prospect isn’t a daunting one.

The Winners Circle

At $20 Beyond Victory is a solid showcase of where the state of the art on Mixed Reality gaming is at the moment, which is what we’ve come to expect from ILM’s immersive gaming department. It points the way forward, especially with the playset aspects, without slamming up against the limitations of the form too much.

I wouldn’t mind seeing an expansion of the game down the line, with a few more tracks and a story sequence or two, provided that some more polish is given to the way cut-scene scaling is handled.

On top of that, if you have nostalgia for Star Wars: Racer or if you’re a Star War toy collector this one is a must have. I can speak for the later group as well, as I’m pretty sure my Hondo Ohnaka Black Series action figure is going to be trying to sell a virtual Volo Bolus some “genuine SoroSuub podracing components” in a story called “This Crate Just Dropped Out Of Hyperspace On Its Own, Inspector.” Coming soon to a living room near me.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory A Mixed Reality Playset is availble now for the Meta Quest 3 & 3S, and priced at $19.99.

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