4/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of ASTRO BOT: Rescue Mission.

Platform: PS4 Time Played: 11 hours Status: Completed If there were any one game that people recommend to play on PS VR, it’d be Astro Bot: Rescue Mission. A cutesy little 3D platformer that was the precursor to both Astro’s Playroom and Game of the Year 2024 winner Astro Bot. Hailed as an utterly fantastic 3D platformer with the gimmick of the camera being your literal eyes, and a great successor to Bot Rescue in The Playroom VR; this game is certainly a great 2D platformer, but not one I would call the greatest ever in my eyes, but that’s definitely not to say that it isn’t great nonetheless. We have this cute little setup where this stupid bitch ass alien steals the VR headset off of the Bots’ ship, destroying it in the process and scattering the 213 Bots aboard the ship across the galaxy. So now it's up to Astro, captain of the Bots, to rescue all of his Bot buddies, and get back the pieces of the ship, including the VR headset from this ugly ahh bratty green fucker. There are four levels in each world, not including the boss level that caps off each world. Each level has eight Bots that you can rescue along with a Chameleon that is simply found by staring at it with your headset for long enough when finding it tucked away in a level, and doing so unlocks challenge stages, but more on those later. My biggest gripe with Rescue Mission overall is the exploration in these levels, and I think it's mainly just due to this game being on a VR platform. I do really like the idea of exploring every nook and cranny of a platformer level by literally looking around the level with your own head and eyes, but it was so aggravating to realize that I had missed a Bot and was unable to go backward through the level, as once you get to a certain checkpoint in the game, you can’t go back, making finding all of the Bots in one go pretty tough at times. Your only real hint is their adorable little “help me” cries as you pass by them, but even then it's never entirely obvious where they are as some can be tucked away pretty well. This kind of exploration worked well with the Chameleons though, as those were always really rewarding to find, and there are no real hints regarding them. It was just annoying to get to the end of a level knowing that I’d have to replay through it to find the one or two Bots that I missed on my first go around. Not the biggest issue in the grand scheme as the levels themselves and the gameplay as still great, but still a big enough issue for me to consider whenever I’m thinking about my overall opinion of the game itself. The gameplay and game feel itself is super smooth and really fun to control. I love using Astro’s little jets as an extra hover jump to assist with platforming while also acting as an attack when jumping over enemies. Same goes with his little punches, love how good it feels to connect those. The camera movement overall is definitely an improvement over The Playroom VR, where that had the camera practically causing instant nausea whenever you moved backward through a level, so perhaps why they did what they did with the camera this time around. Platforming while tilting your head around to follow your movements with Astro is really fun, especially during the challenge levels which are definitely my favorite part of the game overall. The level variety here can be pretty varied, although my favorite one was the one featuring all of the bamboo shoots and temples, where you have a shuriken to chop down the bamboo in order to make platforms for yourself, or just stick ninja stars in the wall as platforms. There are other little gimmick gizmos that you can use throughout the game, one standing out to me being the water one you get in certain lava levels that lets you solidify said lava into walkable platforms. Another nitpick I have is that I didn’t enjoy a majority of the bosses in this game and think they could’ve been better overall. I did enjoy the gorilla and spider bosses, but I feel like the rest of the bosses were just dragged out to be a little too long and just weren’t as fun as those aforementioned ones, including the final boss, which while I did appreciate that that incorporated all of the controller gimmicks seen throughout the game, the phases in between lasted just a little too long for me, although I probably would say that I enjoyed that boss overall. My favorite part of the game as mentioned earlier was all of the challenge levels that the game rewards you for finding the Cameleons in each level. Depending on how well you do in each challenge you can either rescue one or two bots. You unlock the boss challenges automatically which are just tests to see if you can beat them without taking damage, and there are score-based ones with the shuriken or water shooter. But the best ones were just the brief little platforming challenges that tested your skill against the timer. The amount of fun I had while playing those, especially the laser level in the clouds was super fun and very satisfying to complete. Just thinking about replaying those challenge levels provides me with fun. Genuinely if the entire game was like this I think it would be utterly fantastic in my eyes. The gacha system from The Playroom VR also returns, which functions the same as it did in that came, just being something to do with all of the coins/tokens that you collect in each level. Not really all that cool but still nice that it's here. Overall, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission is a really fun, neat, and brief 3D platformer that I’m so glad that I finally got around to checking out, I can definitely see why so many people recommend it, and it's an absolute shame that Sony hasn’t ported it to the PS5 and by extension PSVR2. It only took me around eleven hours to 100% complete the entire game, which is just the perfect amount of time for a platformer such as this. It's so obvious why this laid down the groundwork for Astro’s Playroom and Astro Bot to only improve upon this game’s foundation in the future, breaking free from the VR camera gimmick and finally allowing you to free roam open levels to your heart’s content. But even so, this was a great true start to the Astro Bot series, and one I’d also tell anyone with a PS VR to check out.