Astro Bot Review

PlayStation has had a number of famous characters, or mascots, over the decades. From Ratchet and Clank to Spyro and Sackboy, these characters have managed to capture the imagination of the players and become synonymous with the consoles they released on. And over the past few years, a new fan favorite has been emerging. Astro Bot Rescue Mission, in 2018, introduced PlayStation players to this tiny robot that was rather cute and whimsical, taking on a variety of platforming adventures. But the game's VR-only availability likely limited its audience. A few years later, Astro's Playroom was a free bite-sized PS5 launch game. This gave the character and his tiny adventures a huge boost, and likely resulted in the newly released Astro Bot, a new fuller-length third person platforming game that stars the titular hero.

The story is minimal and begins with Astro and his group of cute bots getting attacked by a green alien while flying through space on their ship. The meta-references remain strong - the ship is the PS5 console, and the alien grabs the CPU out of it, then scatters the other parts such as SSD and memory across the galaxy. The ship crash lands on a sandy planet, which sort of becomes your base. From here, you can use the DualSense controller (Dual Speeder) as your personal little transport to fly to other galaxies that contain a series of planets, each with bots to rescue, as well as to recover parts of your mothership. The progress is mostly linear, as each galaxy has a rescued bot number requirement before the final level can be accessed. As a gatekeeping mechanism, it is sufficient - though notably, you will need to be fairly thorough during the levels, as the final couple of galaxies have high requirements. Still, it's a fairly typical campaign setup for a platforming game.

You'll visit different planets that offer self-contained platforming levels, each with a unique visual theme and very varied gameplay. From green lush islands with Aztec-style themes, to a space casino, to sunny beaches and cold snowy mountains, there are plenty of well-realized landscapes to venture through. The levels are usually not too long, making for a brisk adventure that always offers up something new to look at or interact with. There are also lots of nooks and crannies just off the main path that contain collectibles and the bots that need rescuing, successfully delivering quick shots of fun to solve their brief extra challenge. The level design is quite good and keeps the pacing very engaging.

Each galaxy ends with a boss battle planet that usually has you facing off against some big creature while you are on a platform. This is also typical design, but is fun to play through, and you get two extra lives for these battles so one mistake doesn't cause a restart. The dynamic phases of the battle keep you moving, and opportunities to land some attacks appear during specific moments. After beating the big boss, you actually get to go to the next planet which is a PlayStation-themed adventure, such as one based on God of War or Uncharted. Complete with their signature theme songs, these levels are quite fun to get through and are tightly designed.

There are also extra levels that can be discovered which offer unique, focused challenges. Interestingly, the game does not include any time-based challenges - though on occasion, there are brief scripted chase/escape sequences. That is perhaps because Astro Bot tries to be a very accessible game, one that can be picked up even by younger players - and yet remains highly engaging and enjoyable for adults. The bot only has a couple of moves - jump, extended jump, a punch, and a wind-up punch. He perishes with one hit, but so do most of the enemies; dying isn't a big deal, you are simply reset at the most recent checkpoint, and there is no system of limited lives or failing a level. Some players may scoff at the extremely easy difficulty, but that isn't to say there aren't a few moments that require concentration for tight platforming and quick reactions.

Running and jumping through levels and across platforms remains fun throughout, as you punch enemies away and deal with the environmental hazards that may spring up. Despite the accessible and, some would say, simplistic nature, the game gets a lot of mileage out of the little hero. Enemies have lots of different attacks that may require good timing, or can only be damaged during their momentary recovery phase. Some have ranged attacks, while others rush towards you for melee. Blobs and bugs of all kinds stand in your way, as do tilting and rotating platforms and shifting sands. Jumping and throwing punches feels satisfying and precise enough, though there is a bit of floatiness to it.

There is lots of environment interactivity, from pulling on strings to reveal something, to punching through walls. Astro's extended jump has him shoot beams from his feet - but it's not just a visual effect, and it has a gameplay use, to damage specific enemy types, and also breaks through certain floor surfaces like glass. But what really spices things up are the special tools that you get in some levels - one that lets you temporarily freeze time, another lets you rocket-jump high, and another is a pair of gloves that give you long springy punches. These tools are specific to the level, and the levels are designed around them; the gameplay really comes together during these carefully crafted sequences where traversal and combat start to flow really well. As a 3D action platformer, Astro Bot is a bundle of joy.

None of these abilities are perhaps entirely original or groundbreaking in the genre, but they are just excellently executed here. It's worth a brief note that the game does liberally re-use some of its own visual themes and moments from the previous games. But in this way, Astro Bot can be considered the game that finally brings all of the earlier ideas to fruition, to a full-fledged game. Running at around 6-8 hours for the main adventure, and a few more if you want to collect all 300 bots, it offers fair value at the $60 USD asking price.

All of your hard work and exploration will allow you to rescue the bots that have been scattered across the planets. These bots are transported back to your base at the crashed mothership, where they will hang out and do menial tasks. You'll have to unlock a few sections around the crash site, and here again a certain number of bots will be required to interact with something, such as lifting a rock or creating a bridge made of bots holding each other. A minor annoyance is that when visiting different sections of the home planet, you have to keep asking bots to provide traversal assistance even though you've already unlocked and visited the area.

The adventure levels also contain gold PlayStation coins and puzzle pieces, usually hidden away. The puzzle pieces are used to slowly unlock new buildings at the crash site - a gacha (capsule) vending machine, a color customization for your DualSense ship, and more. The gacha machine is where you can spend those coins, for random cosmetic drops for your bots and other visual customizations. While many of the bots you rescue are generic, others wear costumes based on famous franchises, from Crash Bandicoot to Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid. Unlocking a cosmetic item from a capsule corresponding to a character allows them to perform some cute themed animation when you go to interact with them. All of this is purely cosmetic and has no gameplay implication, but it's fun to see a few times. The coins can also be spent on a helper bird when replaying levels, which helps track down collectibles you previously missed.

That whimsical cuteness of watching a bot dressed up as Solid Snake lose his cardboard box remains at the core of the visual style of Astro Bot. The bots are all joyously screaming little characters that are happy to run around and do your bidding, and will join your dance party anytime. The game's visual style is colorful and bright, and it runs at a smooth 60fps at all times, with no loading screens. The combination of physics and minor environmental destruction always leads to amusing results, supported by sound and visual effects to match. The soundtrack remains strong, with engaging upbeat tunes and distorted vocals - though again a few tracks you've probably heard in the past games. And last but not least, there is a thorough focus on DualSense haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, letting you feel every step and every raindrop, just like the focus was during Astro's Playroom.

Astro Bot feels a bit like a culmination of effort from the previous two games. The original was VR-only, and the follow-up was more like a teaser of what this character and this gameplay design is capable of. With the new self-titled game, it's clear that a new little hero has emerged in the PlayStation universe. It may as well become the next-generation Sackboy, and this 3D platforming debut is already a better offering than A Big Adventure. Some of the ideas here are not wholly original, but with satisfying and yet accessible gameplay, excellent level design and polished high quality visuals, this is probably the best exclusive 3D platformer on PS5 to date.