Astro Bot is an ode to all things PlayStation, and a fruit salad
Team Asobi nails the brief when it comes to making a fun, exciting and slightly challenging platformer to appeal to all ages
Review: Astro Bot
Developed by Team ASOBI and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment
Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆
One of the key indicators of a high-quality game, I’ve always believed, is its moreishness1. It’s a clumsy word and one I’ve raged against in the past. Back then, I could find no better way to describe Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. Today, I think that terrible term is the best way to describe Astro Bot that dropped like a meteor — such was its impact — on the PlayStation 5 last week.
A case in point was my own struggle with completing one level in particular. It was among the harder ones in the game, but at no point did I expect it to take me as long as it did. By the time I began to keep count, it’d been around 15 minutes that I was attempting and re-attempting a level that I’d figured should take no more than a shade over a minute. Thirty-seven tries later (so it turns out I’d misunderstood a visual cue), I’d cracked it. And as the relief washed over me, I realised it wasn’t so much that I desperately wanted the reward on offer (contrary to the X post linked above), it was that I’d had a taste and kept wanting to come back for more, and more.
Plucky little Astro’s third outing (after Astro Bot Rescue Mission, 2018’s VR outing and 2020’s Astro’s Playroom, a sort of welcome to the PS5 generation) builds on its past in almost every conceivable way and emerges as a very impressive platformer. It doesn’t hurt either that the game appears to be the very embodiment of polish and presentation. Set across 80 levels, which are in turn spread across 50 planets in six varied galaxies, The Team Asobi mascot’s latest adventure sees him graduate from the world of glorified tech demos to that of full-blown games. Clocking in at around 15 or so hours for a regular playthrough (much longer if you plan to grab every collectible), Astro Bot operates on a very simple premise:
One fine day, Astro and a bunch of bots bearing a close resemblance to him are off on a space jaunt in a starship that looks like a PS5 console. All of a sudden, they are set upon by nasty green alien Space Bully Nebulax, who attacks the ship and steals its CPU. The resultant malfunction and explosion results in the PS5-ship’s core components and each of its 300 members of crew being scattered across a bunch of galaxies. Astro’s job is to retrieve all the parts and along the way rescue as many of the bots as he can.
And in so doing, Astro encounters a whole host of power-up backpacks (a monkey that lends the use of its arms, a mouse that provides the ability to shrink, a rooster that serves as a jetpack and so on), a gacha game for new cosmetics, and an array of VIP Bots. Astro’s Playroom veterans will recall seeing cameos (in bot form) from a bunch of familiar IPs including but not restricted to Metal Gear Solid, Death Stranding, Heavy Rain, inFamous, Gravity Rush and Ghost of Tsushima. They’re back but in far greater numbers, and in a more interactive form this time around.
Everything bite-sized and in its place
Astro Bot takes you across a myriad different environments and settings over the course of its many levels — that vary in difficulty — and yet, nothing ever feels overwhelming. Sure, there are certain optional challenge stages (like the one mentioned in the second paragraph) and boss fights that can be tough nuts to crack the first (or even twenty-first) time around, but there’s never a dead-end, so to speak, that you encounter in Astro Bot. And a lot has to do with the game design that prioritises little bite-size chunks over massive sections that require greater commitment/investment.
For instance, regular levels are strewn with checkpoints that ensure you never have to track back very far if Astro meets an untimely demise. Boss battles, that tend to be longer, three-course affairs see our protagonist quietly (the game slips these in quiet matter-of-factly, and without any song and dance) handed two health capsules that bequeath him with the ability to return after dying twice. Further, no level takes very long to complete — main story ones last between five and eight minutes, while the optional ones usually take just over a minute. In terms of accessibility too, main levels largely rely on logic rather than sleight of hand or elite eye-hand coordination. This means progress is less a matter of if than when.
Then there are the quality of life features that make Astro Bot gleam that brighter. For starters, you have the optional little bird bot that serves as a guide on levels that you’ve already completed, in order to help you locate all the collectibles you’ve missed. Considering that collecting bots is key to advancing through the game, this is a godsend. So too is the ability to leave a level midway (provided you’re playing it for at least the second time) on your Dual Speeder, the DualSense controller-shaped jet, as soon as you’ve secured all the collectibles. A lot of games would require that you complete the whole level in order to retain your collectibles. Not Astro Bot. No Siree Bob!
In terms of compartmentalising gameplay and avoiding player fatigue, it’s always useful to have a few distractions on hand, and Astro Bot is full of them. Whether it’s a gacha machine through which to win accessories for your VIP Bots, skins for Astro and his Dual Speeder, or the safari (that serves to unlock the most delightful photo mode2), there’s a lot to do here should you find yourself flummoxed by a given level. All of these factors combine to provide that moreishness with which Astro Bot is replete. You might be unable to pass one level, but there’s plenty you can do in the meantime, and none of it is all that demanding. Light, breezy and delicious,… like a fruit salad.
An homage to 30 years of PlayStation
The PlayStation marks its 30th anniversary in a few months (the original PlayStation, known then as PSX, was launched in Japan in December 1994). What better then time for a title like Astro Bot to pay rich tribute to the console and most of the colourful characters who have graced it with their presence over the decades? We’ll get to the console part momentarily. For now, feast your eyes on this dazzling array of virtual celebrities immortalised through the lens of Astro Bot.
From the premise of the game (putting together a PS5 starship) and the level design, to the Dual Speeder and even Astro’s colour scheme, almost everything here is a love letter to the PS5. Those of you who’ve played Astro’s Playroom will recall the homages paid to every previous generation of PlayStation consoles. This time, however, it’s all about the PS5, and rightly so. After all, the console will mark its fourth anniversary in November. But beyond the visual references and Easter eggs, the most meaningful way in which Astro Bot acknowledges the PS5 is its use of the DualSense controller.
This piece of tech burst out of the gates in November 2020 as the controller to beat all controllers. Demo videos (you remember the ones with the white and blue iron filings, right?) did their best to convey the notion that Sony was about to put something truly revolutionary in your hands. And with Astro’s Playroom (bundled with the PS5), this seemed like it would turn into a reality. Except it didn’t. Since the console’s launch, I can count on one hand the number of games that truly took advantage of the controller’s capabilities and on one finger the number of games that made the most of them.
Astro Bot goes to great lengths to put every little function of the DualSense into play — steering by tilting the controller, adaptive triggers reacting differently to the various power-ups, blowing on the touchpad to blow air in game, the built-in speaker adding to the main audio, and the whole host of different haptics on offer. This isn’t kind on the controller’s battery, of course, but them’s the breaks. When I disabled the built-in speaker and the haptics, I found the experience to be distinctly poorer. There’s a critical difference between gimmickry and utility, and Team Asobi understands this deeply — evident in the fact that I didn’t for a second find the DualSense’s behaviour to be superfluous or force-fitted.
Fruit salad and Nothing Else Matters
Be honest. You read the phrase ‘fruit salad’ a few paragraphs earlier and in the back of your mind, it seemed like a weird one to throw in there. After all, there are so many other things that can be described as ‘light, breezy and delicious’. A part of you may have even ventured to speculate that this may be some sort of foreshadowing. If so, well done. While I’ve spent over 1,500 words so far extolling the virtues of Astro Bot, I’d be remiss not to point out a downside. Of course, this downside is less of Team Asobi’s own making, and more of Sony’s, but it contributes to the bigger picture.
Traditionally, the number of first-party platformers on PlayStation consoles has been quite low. This tends to be Nintendo’s fiefdom. In fact, in this generation and prior to Astro Bot, Sackboy: A Big Adventure was the only full-length title (which excluded Astro’s Playroom) had staked a claim to being part of that category on the blue team. Sony’s focus for first-party releases, for better or worse, has largely been the bombastic, cinematic and larger-than-life single player experiences that prioritise high-quality voice-acting, face capture, direction and epic musical scores over gameplay innovation. This isn’t really a criticism. It is what it is.
And the PlayStation 5 generation has thus far suffered from a dearth of new first-party offerings, with a majority falling into the remaster-remake or sequel category. Let’s switch things back to a gastronomic point-of-view. Imagine you’ve been on a steady diet of greasy and extremely rich food for a while and it leaves you somewhat satiated, but mostly grappling a case of heartburn. You’ve looked for other options in your vicinity, but it’s more or less the same stuff. And so you’ve had to venture out of your neighbourhood (let’s call it the ‘first-party compound’) to find alternatives. Imagine then that after weeks of masala-laden fare (the sort that is most certainly not unappetising, but takes a toll on your insides), you chance upon a new feature on the menu — a fruit salad.
It’s refreshing, tasty, healthy and it cleans out your alimentary canal. Hell, maybe it even gives you a renewed sense of enthusiasm for life itself, and all is well with the world. But, you’ll soon realise it was just a fruit salad. It was a wonderfully put-together fruit salad, but that’s what it was: A dessert or a starter. To use a different example, it’s a bit like how Nothing Else Matters blew the minds of people because they were used to, and expected, a certain type of Metallica. A ballad (fine, a power ballad) by the band that wrote the likes of Battery, Creeping Death and Hit the Lights was far from unprecedented, it was downright genius. And back in 1991, it probably also had people screaming, “SOTY! SOTY!” from the terraces to anyone who would care to listen.
And just as Nothing Else Matters wasn’t a bad song by any stretch, neither is Astro Bot a bad game. I do however feel that the greatness of both these entities has been greatly enlarged by the context — the scene on which they arrived, the market, the appetite of consumers and so on. Astro Bot is a great deal of fun and will probably be your favourite game for a while if you love platformers. While I wholly recommend it, I do believe it is more a case of the perfect game at the perfect time — a ‘lightning in the bottle’ moment, if you will — rather than an all-time classic.
Game reviewed on PlayStation 5. Review code provided by publisher
Food or drink described as ‘moreish’ is so nice that you want to keep having more and more of it
Where most videogame photo modes attempt to position themselves as a version of a DSLR camera rolled into a high-end photo-editing suite, Astro Bot’s photo mode is as simple as a point and shoot. Its biggest novelty is that moving the DualSense controller from side to side lets you tilt the viewfinder to get the best frame.