Astro Bot is delightfully good – Review

Nintendo is the undeniable king of the mascot platformers, dominating the genre for years with a certain red plumber whose penchant for mushrooms is best ignored. Other games have come close to matching Nintendo’s icon over the years, but not from the likes of Xbox and PlayStation who have been content to let Mario hold the crown. But then the PS5 launched and with it came Astro Bot’s Playroom, an endlessly charming freebie that grabbed people’s attention for its clever use of the Dualsense and its nostalgic PlayStation vibe. But at the core was a hell of a platformer, and now a few years later Astro Bot is starring in a triple-A 3D platformer that might just rival the diminutive pipe technician.

Part of the fun is because it’s just cool to play a big-budget triple-A platformer that isn’t heavily limited by janky hardware. There are some amazing indie platformers out there that can compete with the best of them on gameplay and general vibe, but Astro Bot is the whole package: it’s a great platformer backed by a big budget on hardware that lets it shine. It’s got the Nintendo magic with the PlayStation razzle-dazzle. The Mario swagger with the Kratos body.

One thing Astro Bot has not lost since his last outing is the strong attachment to the PlayStation brand. Part of me is worried that Asobi and Sony are too focused on tying Astro Bot to PlayStation and I hope that in his next adventure, Astro Bot can be allowed to stand on his own two cute little feet again. That’s a concern for the future, though, so let’s push it to the side for now.

We’re immediately greeted by Astro and several hundred of his pals cruising the galaxy in their mothership, which just so happens to be a PS5, when Space Bully Nebulax pulls up looking for a fight. He steals the mothership’s processor, causing the PS5 to crash-land onto a nearby planet. It’s up to Astro Bot to rescue his 300 missing comrades, most of them dressed up as classic PlayStation characters, and find the scattered parts needed to fix the PS5 so they can hunt down Space Bully Nebulax and kick his alien ass.

And that’s it for the story. Like most classic 3D platformers, Astro Bot doesn’t spend too much time on the narrative because it wants you to just jump in and have fun exploring the dozens and dozens of bite-sized levels spread across multiple galaxies. What blooms from the simple premise is around 10-hours of the finest platforming and adventuring I’ve ever had the robotic pleasure of experiencing. And just when you think you’ve seen everything the game has, it throws in another excellent boss fight or cool set-piece or you discover yet another cute little detail.

If you played Astro’s Playroom then you’ll be instantly familiar with the moveset available to you: a simple jump, a laser-powered glide and two types of attack. Indeed, one of my few criticisms of Astro Bot is the limited suite of moves, especially when compared, once again, to the Mario series. But while simplistic, Astro’s moveset is a joy to use thanks to the precise, responsive controls. It’s almost indescribable – you have to hold the controller and move Astro Bot’s astro butt around to appreciate the crisp controls.

The result is a game that is incredibly good at getting you into that magical zen-like flow. The way the levels are designed and the sharp controls make it so easy to keep the momentum going, to quickly read where you need to go and what you need to do, that your brain can switch off and just go with the flow. It’s a magical feeling and one that only a select few games can pull off.

Of course, it helps that Astro Bot is so obscenely charming on every imaginable level. You can find it in everything, from the cutesy enemy designs to the catchy, bouncy music that I still find myself humming under my breath. At one point I leapt atop a cow (every living being is a robot of some type) and discovered a bespoke animation where Astro Bot sits astride the beast and then hugs it. There are heaps of small details like this that help bring the game to life, a myriad of little ways that Team Asobi imbued their love and passion into Astro’s journey. Just when I think I’ve seen everything the game has to offer, it gifts me with a magical level about a musical tree or rescuing a massive starfish. There’s seemingly no end to Team Asobi’s imagination and desire to entertain.

Speaking of bringing the game to life, Team Asobi remain the undisputed king’s of using the Dualsense controller to the fullest. Every level begins with gliding in on a customised Dualsense controller, using the gyro controls to carefully (or not so carefully) land. You can feel the gentle pitter-patter of Astro’s feet as he jogs along metal and the steady drumroll of raindrops hitting his tiny umbrella. These details are subtle, yes, but they also help immerse you into the world. I can’t help but wish more companies would use Dualsense’s capabilities, although I suppose I can understand why they don’t – it’s a lot of development time and money to sink into something most people probably don’t care about.

Astro’s moveset is augmented by various power-ups in the form of cuddly animals that leap onto his back and go for a ride. Whereas the Mario games opt to have multiple power-ups sprinkled around, Team Asobi prefers to have one per level so that the entire area can be built around using it to the fullest. There are some absolute banger power-ups here, but let’s talk about a couple of them – my favourite might be freezing because of how you get to platform across speeding obstacles, making it to the other side just in the nick of time. There’s also a fantastic power-up that shrinks Astro Bot which is used in some excellent sequences. Oh! And there’s one that let’s you soak up water like a giant robo-sponge! And this really cool chicken that blasts you upwards like a rocket! And…and and this other one that makes platforms in mid air! And…yeah, you get the point.

A lot of the charm comes from collecting the 300 little robots scattered across the levels. Many of them are generic Astro Bots, but a huge chunk of them are cosplaying as classic PlayStation characters or as references to other games. You can collect the likes of Nathan Drake, Lara Croft, Dante, a heap of monkeys from Ape Escape, Kratos and so many more. It’s PlayStation Pokemon, basically.

Collecting the little bots scattered throughout the levels like presents is a joy in its own right, but the game does one better by sending them home to the crash site. Whenever you return you’re greeted by every bot you’ve found, all of them gathering to cheerfully welcome you back before they scurry off to hang out, have fun and wait for you to visit them. It’s like being welcomed home by 300 dogs that adore you! They also serve a practical function – they form ropes and bridges to help you reach new areas of the crash site, but that feels secondary to the bigger purpose they serve: they’re just fun. It’s cool to see them all hanging out, and you can spend coins in a gacha machine to unlock props for them as well.

There is a strange undercurrent to collecting all these pieces of PlayStation history though, one that most people probably aren’t even going to think about. You see, there’s a good chunk of the lost bots that represent IPs and games you can’t even play on PlayStation these days. For that matter, of the IPs present only one of them needs a PS5 to be played. All the rest can be played on PS4 or elsewhere. None of this really affects your enjoyment of the superb platforming, but I found it interesting nonetheless. It explores PlayStation’s past and celebrates many of the games that made the brand successful, but it also highlights how unneeded the PS5 can sometimes feel. As much as it is a celebration of the company’s history, It isn’t a celebration of PlayStations present.

Each little galaxy of levels is capped off by a special themed area where Astro Bots dons the costume of PlayStation icon, inheriting their abilities for a spell. The first of these is Ape Escape, so Astro Bot wields the classic net and gets to run around capturing pesky apes as they hide in bushes and scamper about. Another level has you playing as Astro Kratos, complete with an axe you can hurl and a badass techno remix of the God of War theme music. These levels are, of course, a highlight of the game, which is why it’s a shame that there’s only a handful of them. I would have loved more of them, covering an even wider range of PlayStation IP, but I guess Team Asobi have to keep something back for the future. And, perhaps, if they and focused too much on dressing up Astro Bot it would have taken the spotlight away from the little android.

The boss fights toward the end of each galaxy are another highlight in an already excellent game. Some people have complained that Team Asobi have resused the bosses from Astro Bot titles and that’s true – however, the actual mechanics of the fight are entirely different. I actually found it pretty cool to see the bosses back. After all, if Mario can fight Bowser for the millionth time, why can’t Astro Bot face-off against some returning foes? Like the rest of the game, the boss fights are extremely easy (this is not a game that’s going to challenge you, except for a couple of slightly trickier optional levels) but immensely fun.

Here’s the one word I think sums up Astro Bot. Well, two words, but only because I’m a bit of a twat: fucking delightful. It’s delightful. It’s delightfully charming. It’s delightfully fun to play. It’s delightful to look at. Man, it’s just fucking delightful.

While Astro’s past adventures in VR and as a tech-demo on PS5 were great in tjheir own rights, Astro Bot proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mechanical marvel can not only star in his very own triple-A, full-priced banger of a game, but that he could also be PlayStation’s new mascot if the company is interested. While he might not be ever as popular as PlayStation’s more serious characters, he’s got family appeal, something which the brand doesn’t have much of.

Astro Bot has everything you could want in a 3D platformer; crisp controls, gorgeous visuals, excellent level designs, fun power ups and oodles of charm. Mario has competition, and unlike the plumber, this hero doesn’t need mushrooms to have a good time.