In an era where PlayStation constantly feels creatively bankrupt, Astro Bot is a breath of fresh air. To date, Astro’s Playroom is still one of my favorite experiences on PlayStation 5. The focus on nostalgia combined with clever platforming made for a grand time, especially as you navigate through your PlayStation 5 system as Astro. Almost four years later, Astro has finally received his own console game in the form of Astro Bot, a grand adventure boasting over 50 different planets.
Astro Bot kicks off with Astro and the slew of Bots riding around space inside a PlayStation 5. Out of nowhere, Nebulax, a space alien, appears and rips apart the PS5 to grab its CPU. This causes components of the entire system to disperse across the galaxy, leaving Astro stranded on a deserted planet. Now, it’s up to you to save the missing Bots and repair the Mothership!
With a quick and straightforward premise, Astro Bot immediately dives into the gameplay – the star of the show for any platformer. There are five separate galaxies for you to complete, each with its own boss waiting at the end. Additionally, there is also a secret galaxy called the Lost Galaxy, which can be unlocked by finding alternate endings in designated levels. Every galaxy is home to one part of the PlayStation 5, whether it be the SSD, GPU, RAM, or console covers.
Astro’s Biggest Adventure Yet
Upon entering the first world, you’ll instantly feel at home, as Astro’s moveset is identical to Astro’s Playroom. The movement feels satisfying, with simple double jump and punch mechanics that are plenty of fun. Team ASOBI has taken the move set and idea of abilities from Astro’s Playroom and brought them into this title with a much larger scope.
Throughout the game, you unlock all sorts of abilities. These range from a Sponge ability that lets you soak up water and propel in size to Barkster the Bulldog Booster, a dog that allows Astro to boost with rocket-like speeds. As you navigate between each world, you will find more and more of these power-ups. Some of these abilities feel severely underutilized, however. Certain mini-levels have their own exclusive power-up, which left me wondering about the possibilities if Astro could have used that ability in one of the main levels.
While abilities are used for enemies, there are countless uses for them in the environment, too. Often, you will need to utilize different abilities to leap across platforms, climb up cliffs, or slow down time to jump across massive casino coins. Incorporating these abilities into the environment was a great choice, as it doesn’t allow any of them to become dull after knocking out the common enemies. As you might expect, you will often find hidden routes or areas when using different power-ups. While these are present, I do wish more existed beyond the three puzzle pieces to find in each world.
Many enemies await you in each world, with certain worlds offering mini-bosses to best before moving on. This is one of the weakest points in the game, from my experience. Generally, enemy design can elevate a game entirely, as it can challenge the player with new obstacles. That isn’t the case in Astro Bot, however. Here, the game throws the same ten or so common enemies at you for the entirety of the game outside of bosses. None of the enemies are even challenging, with many requiring just a simple punch to defeat.
Moreover, a few of the enemies have some frustrating hitboxes. Specifically, the Voltee enemies were a pain to wrangle up at times. If you touch them, Astro will get electrocuted, so I had to resort to Astro’s laser hover. This led to worlds where I would die multiple times, merely missing the enemy by a fraction of an inch and getting electrocuted. I would not say this was an issue that plagued the experience at all, but it did become frustrating when the same three or so enemies presented problems time and time again.
By far, the best enemy encounters in the game are the boss fights. Each of these is meticulously designed, with fun mechanics that cleverly utilize the different power-ups. As mentioned, each galaxy has one boss at the end, but certain worlds have a mini-boss that appears, too. These are all a joy to experience and one of the main highlights of the game for me. Team ASOBI certainly emphasized scale with bosses, as you often see them towering over Astro. You might find yourself climbing up the side of a Pirate’s missing leg to punch his head off, or you might end up sucking the yolk out of eggs to jump on the head of a boss. The creativity ran wild, and I loved every second of each of the boss fights.
Creative Overload
This creativity shines not only in boss design but especially in world design. Astro Bot features 80 different levels, each with a unique setting and environment. Naturally, with so many worlds, the levels themselves aren’t too long. Most of the levels will take you under 10 minutes to complete, with a few stretching over that. This design is similar to what is seen in Super Mario Galaxy, offering plenty of variety and quantity that doesn’t dip in quality.
Astro travels through worlds inspired by a casino, a Japanese bathhouse, and more. Often, worlds are designed specifically for abilities. There is an incredible level called Downsize Surprise where Astro gains a mouse power-up ability, allowing you to shrink to the size of a blade of grass with the press of a button. As you navigate the level, you can find all kinds of new perspectives and secrets by using the ability.
At the end of every galaxy, you’ll find a world that is directly inspired by one of PlayStation’s IPs. This includes games like God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted, and more. I found these to be some of the most fun levels, as Team ASOBI made tremendous efforts to model aspects like enemies, buildings, and environments directly after these IPs. Slinging around the Leviathan Axe or shooting enemies with a pistol as Nathan Drake filled me with nothing but joy. My personal favorite level was the world based on Ape Escape, which granted Astro a net, allowing you to chase and capture the Bots running about.
Each of these worlds is vibrant and filled with life. The charm of the entire game is elevated and brought to life by levels overflowing with color. Even in levels that take you to a spooky setting with a minimal color palette, the art direction never fails to delight. Again, this is a major contrast to almost everything Sony has put out over the last five years and beyond. The push for realism can be detrimental to quality art design. Everything in Astro Bot is modeled after a robot, whether animals, enemies, or anything else.
As you navigate through the levels, you will see a variety of objectives and collectibles to complete. Every world has multiple Bots to find, usually totaling seven per world. Some Bots are right out in the open, but others will require you to search through the level to find them. Once saved, Bots are sent to the hub world, where you can interact with them. Though collecting all 300 is optional, you must meet Bot requirements to unlock new galaxies. Additionally, you also have three Puzzle Piece collectibles available in each world. These are used to unlock new buildings in the hub world, allowing you to customize your DualSense Speeder, change Astro’s costume, and unlock new items for Bots through the Gacha Lab.
Finding all 300 Bots and 120 Puzzle Pieces will take you around 15 hours, give or take a few hours, depending on your speed. This is a great length for the game, with an ample amount of side content to discover. Speaking of collectibles, I do wish some of them were a little more challenging to find. The game is pretty easy in every aspect, which is to be expected considering the major-appeal nature of a 3D platformer like this. However, I would have liked to see some tricky platforming to reach certain Puzzle Pieces since the levels themselves are so easy.
As outlined, many of the game’s key features revolve around the hub world. This is the planet where Astro crash lands at the beginning of the game. The middle of the map contains the remnants of the Mothership, which will slowly be repaired as you collect the missing parts from each galaxy. Every Bot you rescue will return to this planet, where you can run around and interact with them. The Gacha Lab offers different items for each character, such as Aku Aku for Crash Bandicoot.
This world itself has a few secrets up its sleeve, which can be accessed once you rescue a certain number of Bots. These sections often have you solving simple puzzles and utilizing Bots to reach a crashed satellite, which will reveal the next galaxy for you to take on. Overall, the hub world is somewhere you can easily spend hours posing with your favorite Bots and discovering fun animations from each of them. It’s a blast to watch the population and livelihood grow as you complete each world one by one.
Some of the Bots you will discover are extremely niche picks, which made me happy to see. When I say niche picks, some of these IPs have not been represented since the PlayStation 1. Games like Ore no Ryouri are here, represented by a Bot. Others will be characters from major PlayStation 4 titles, like Sam Porter Bridges from Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. It’s worth noting that although you can view a directory of each of the bots in the hub world, Team ASOBI has not added the ability to see which series they are from. Some Bots have generic costumes, which left me puzzled about what game or series they belonged to. In a future update, adding the title of the game the Bot is from in the directory would be a great change.
For the next Astro Bot title, I’d be curious to see Team ASOBI take a step back, shrinking the number of worlds and offering maybe ten or so that are much bigger in size. The vast difference in planets is fun to experience, but sometimes, this left me wishing for more on certain levels. Alongside abilities, these worlds feel underutilized, begging for more expansion to be had.
That’s not to say there is not enough content in them—each world is fully realized. However, the settings and ideas used in each are often fresh for the genre, and I would have loved to see more. Whether that be multiple levels based on one world or expanded worlds, fleshing out these environments would make a great game even better.
A Technical Marvel
If there is one area that impressed me the most, it’s the technology behind Astro Bot and the DualSense features. This is easily the most impressive game on PlayStation 5—it’s not even close. From the opening segment, I could feel the grains of sand in the DualSense as I walked across the deserted planet. Every environment feels like it has something new to offer, with different haptic feedback used to convey Astro’s actions.
There is a clever use of the DualSense to trigger events in the environment, requiring you to do things like blow into the microphone, tilt the controller left or right, and more. One of the best showcases of these haptic features is when repairing the Mothership with new components. Team ASOBI cleverly implemented various repair actions, like slotting in the memory to the RAM block, cleaning out the fan in the Cooling Unit, and more. No other game on PlayStation 5 utilizes the DualSense in this manner; Team ASOBI is doing things I never thought were possible with the controller.
I was blown away by what the team accomplished using the DualSense in Astro’s Playroom, but that ironically feels like a tech demo now. The use of haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and everything else allows Astro Bot to stand out as the best of the best on PlayStation 5 for DualSense.
As for the technology in the game, it’s mind-blowing. The visuals are outstanding, and the art design is impressive, as discussed. Everything is crisp, with not a sore spot in sight to look at. The frame rate also locks at 60 frames per second for the entirety of the game, as I noticed zero dips at all during my playthrough. Too often, we see titles released with a plethora of performance problems, so this was a welcome surprise. You won’t need to choose between graphics or performance either, as the game only offers one mode.
I lost my mind countless times at the physics available in the game. You will often find yourself in environments with hundreds of small moveable objects, and I fail to recall any other game that has captured the look and feel of pushing through a crowd of objects like this one. This also applies to fluids, which have a lot of variety in the game. Most of these are a bit heavy to sell the feel of movement, but nonetheless, it is very impressive.
The sound is also excellent. The sound design throughout for each of the abilities and actions is sharp and crisp, and it feels in tune with the world of Astro Bot. Kenneth C M Young returned to compose the soundtrack after composing the prior two games, and it’s another good soundtrack overall. With so many different worlds, the soundtrack spans many different ideas, but it generally keeps the game’s upbeat and energetic feel.
Lost in Nostalgia
Astro Bot marks Team ASOBI’s third go at the series, with the first game developed for PlayStation VR and the second as a pack-in for PlayStation 5. This third title is by far the largest the studio has created thus far, with over 60 developers working on the project. One of the core philosophies Studio Head Nicolas Doucet implemented with this release was the idea of quality over quantity. Instead of following industry norms and looking to pack as much content as possible in the game, Team ASOBI did the opposite – create a polished game, avoiding “unnecessary downtime” in the process. That focused vision paid off, as Astro Bot does not skip a beat for the entirety of its 15-hour run time.
For better or worse, Astro Bot is a game about celebrating PlayStation’s 30th anniversary. The game is home to hundreds of references to iconic PlayStation characters, some of which we haven’t seen since the late 1990s. In my experience, this is a double-edged sword. On one hand, this made the journey of discovering new bots in each level fascinating. I eagerly awaited each new bot, as I was constantly surprised to see even third-party characters like Dante, Leon S. Kennedy, or Crash Bandicoot appear. The PlayStation-themed levels were a joy to experience, with creative spins on some of my favorite PlayStation characters. Most of the time, Astro Bot feels like walking down a nostalgiac PlayStation museum.
On the other hand, I do think the game sort of struggles with its identity as a result. Astro is PlayStation, and PlayStation is Astro. Astro himself is essentially a blank canvas that can be molded into whatever Team ASOBI chooses. When looking across the 3D platformer market, sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly defines Astro as a mascot. Thankfully, the world design is diverse and refreshing, but this is something that crossed my mind more than once throughout the game. For the next Astro Bot title, I’d love to see Team ASOBI make Astro become its own separate entity from the PS5, allowing for side characters, memorable dynamics, and a defining personality.
With so much creativity and charm packed in, Astro Bot is an easy recommendation. It’s a game simply focused on fun, and that’s something Sony desperately needed with the catalog of the PlayStation 5. Team ASOBI has done a wonderful job at developing a fully-fledged console experience for the mascot, and I cannot wait to experience the free DLC levels later this year.
3D platformers are one of my favorite genres, as they have shaped my love for games over almost two decades. While Astro Bot is a great time, it never reached the highs of games like Super Mario Odyssey for me. I think the game has so many great ideas, but many went underutilized, leaving me pining for more. Regardless, Astro Bot is the best 3D platformer since Kirby and the Forgotten Land, and the PlayStation 5 at last has a game from Sony that makes it worth picking up.
