IWhen I say that Astro Bot reminds me of Super Mario Galaxy, I couldn’t praise it more highly. It’s not that it’s a derivative game – in fact, it’s the abundance of new ideas that puts it up there with Nintendo’s best 3D platformers. It’s taken me through its own galaxy of planetoid-style levels, from bathhouses to diorama-sized jungle temples to rainy islands, each of which houses a brilliant one-time-use idea, like a pair of frog-shaped boxing gloves or a monkey with a backpack or a watch that stops time and lets you freeze giant oncoming darts so you can jump over them. It’s a splendid thing to witness this development team’s creativity unleashed.
Team Asobi has already made a couple of short-form Astro Bot games (one for PSVR, Rescue Mission, and another that came bundled with the PS5 at launch, Astro’s Playroom), but this one is a full-length one, complete with challenging bonus levels that play out like electrified tests of skill for the generation raised on 3D platformers. It’s hugely fun and full of character, thanks to the titular blue-and-white chibi robot and his group of friends, many of whom are dressed as characters from the darker corners of PlayStation history. The attention paid to these robots – their animation, their mannerisms, their dance moves, and their little cries for help when they’re trapped in a tree threatened by malevolent octopi – fills them to the brim with personality.
In Astro’s Playroom, the idea was that it took place within the PlayStation 5 itself (you played levels based on the zoom speed of the SSD and its graphics processing unit), and the visual design of the environment had a technological feel to it, with trees made of tangled wires and patterns of lines and switches in the style of computer chips decorating every smooth surface. Astro Bot has a similar aesthetic, but isn’t limited to it.
This time, the PS5 is the robot mothership, and you’ve crash-landed on a desert planet, scattering hundreds of robots across the surrounding galaxy. As the last remaining robot, you navigate each level in a rescue ship shaped like a PS5 controller, rally your comrades, and rebuild your ship back home.
At the end of each cluster of planets lurks a boss that looks like it’s straight out of a cartoon (or even a 90s platformer), guarding a piece of the ship that you then clean up and reassemble with giant robotic arms, carefully pulling triggers and tilting the controller to polish away dirt, slice away chunks of ice or align components. It’s wonderfully fun and tactile, and in fact the entire game revolves around the unique and sometimes bizarre capabilities of the PS5 controller. Inventive use is found for everything from the tiny microphone to the touchpad in the centre of the controller, as Astro Bot searches for weak spots in walls and desperately clings to the rescue ship as you guide it through space by tilting it like a steering wheel.
The developer’s obvious mastery of the PlayStation 5 is impressive here. Even when there are a hundred robots on screen building a bridge for you to cross, or when the scenery explodes into a thousand tiny fragments that bounce around the place, or when you’re flying down a water slide accompanied by a bunch of bouncy balls… everything is smooth and snappy. You can cut logs with Astro’s jetpack and then test whether they float (they do), which is pointless but great fun. When you fly through clouds of space dust shaped like PlayStation symbols, you can feel the impact of each one as a little rumble on the right part of the controller. Astro’s punching, jumping and flying maneuvers are absolutely perfect. This level of detail makes all the difference in a game. It’s the kind of luxurious care that most developers simply can’t afford, and as such it feels like a special treat for the player, the equivalent of five-star service.
I also really liked how cool it was to play Astro Bot with my kids. There’s no two-player co-op mode, but the game works well as a controller-passing game instead; my seven-year-old was content to watch me play, laughing at the jokes, and my five-year-old wandered around the safer parts of the levels, passing me the controller whenever he hit a tricky part.
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Several of Astro Bot’s planets have small hub areas that feel like enclosed playgrounds, with balls to kick and non-threatening enemies to hit, pools to jump into, and little acrobatic challenges to tackle. My kids were fascinated by the cuteness and vibrancy of it all, even as references to Uncharted, God of War, Ape Escape, and every other old PlayStation game you can imagine slipped past them.
Astro Bot remains the wonderful tribute to PlayStation history and hardware design that Astro’s Playroom was, but it’s been given room to grow beyond a personality-filled tech demo and become the best platformer I’ve played in many years. In fact, it’s one of the best platformers I’ve ever played. ever I played a ton of games from the 90s, and being a kid, I’ve played a ton of them. PlayStation has been missing a great homegrown family game since LittleBigPlanet, and Astro Bot is a worthy heir to that series’ fun, entertaining legacy.