3/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of The Playroom.

Platform: PS4 Time Played: 1.35 hours Status: Completed When Astro Bot released on PS5 this past September and after hearing all of the rave reviews about the game, I knew I had to get it and play it as soon as possible. But me being me, I knew that I’d want to play all of the games staring Astro and his bot buddies beforehand, and so after years and years of owning a PS4, I finally borrowed a PlayStation Camera from a friend and tried out The Playroom, and while it is just an hour-long short little tech demo for the camera itself, it honestly was a really fun experience overall. I can see that on launch that this would have easily been very very boring, with you really only being able to play with Asobi, play with a group of bots walking around your room or inside of your DualShock 4, or playing air hockey with a buddy using the touch pad. Getting all of the trophies in these modes would definitely take you less than 20 minutes, but let me tell you, playing around with those AR Bots was a blast. I was offering them drinks, punching them around like I was Godzilla, etc. Now the free DLC that released afterwards does make this package a lot better overall. I think Toy Maker and AR Studio are a little lackluster, both utilizing the PlayStation Second Screen app, which this game was NOT updated to give you proper instructions when they removed the feature from the PlayStation app proper and made it its own app, so that shit took forever to set up. But still, in Toy Maker you just draw stuff or throw out premade stuff for your AR Bots to play with, and in AR Studio you just decorate your room using your phone as the controller to set things up like lights, put a mask on your head, change your controller lights, etc. all pretty lackluster stuff but are nice novelties to play around with. My Alien Buddy is the first mode that feels like a proper game. You use gyro controls to move around this little alien in his UFO throughout these little tiny stages of little toys buildings, figures, barns, cars and whatnot, and I guess the objective is to suck up the golden figures in each little set to move onto the next one. At one point there’s a big ass rave, but that’s really it, not a whole lot to do, and not the most engaging or fun thing ever. But what is fun and engaging is Ninja Bots. This shit rocked. You play as, well, a ninja bot, and use gyro controls to move him across this linear auto-run level, collecting coins along the way all while shooting shuriken at incoming enemies by flicking forwards using the touch pad, and jumping by tossing the controller upwards to dodge obstacles. I ended up playing this mode a handful of times to get all of the trophies and even though there’s only one level, each run was just as fun as the last. Overall, The Playroom is a really neat little tech demo. For years I never really knew what it was or ever really looked into it, but I’m glad that I finally got around to checking it out. There’s really no reason for me to ever go back to this, but if I were to, it’d be to experience the joy that is Ninja Bots.