4.5/5 ★ – UpwardBoss's review of ASTRO BOT.

In 2020, Astro's Playroom was released as a free pack-in game with the PS5, and it mostly existed to be a tech demo to show off the new features of the DualSense controller. However, the game itself was.... really fun, and after it was released, many people (myself included) were so impressed with what Team Asobi made in a short 5 hour (at most) experience, that there was widespread demand for a full game that expands on those ideas and gives us more of what made Astro's Playroom so good. We got it. One problem with how long my reviews take to write these days (along with the fact that I am not famous enough to get review codes) is that they're often published long after everyone knows whether a game is good or not. This doesn't really matter if a game doesn't have a definitive consensus, but if it has received universal acclaim (or the opposite), everything that needs to be said has already been said (it doesn't help that I didn't actually play this game until two weeks after release because I was too busy writing the Star Wars Outlaws review and playing the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown DLC). So now, over three weeks after its initial release, after everyone has already seen the 94 score on Metacritic from both critics AND users and the 99% recommended rating on Opencritic, you are not clicking on this review to know whether Astro Bot is good. You already know that. You're here to hear me tell you what you already know. So I will. Astro Bot is an absolute delight. Excellent platforming, fantastic level design with a ton of variety, a phenomenal soundtrack, and it's one of the few PS5 games to actually make full use of the DualSense controller's features. I do have a few problems with it, but absolutely none of them are even close to severe enough to ruin this experience. It's easily the frontrunner for my Game of the Year at this point, and it will truly take something special to beat it. Now, I do not expect that this review will be particularly long, because there isn't really that much to talk about. Astro Bot is a 3D platformer, very similar to the type of platformers that were widespread in the late 90s before falling out of vogue during the PS3 era. As such, Astro Bot is a relatively simple game in terms of its structure. It has seven galaxies with a handful of linear levels in each. You run and jump for 20 hours (at most) and then the game ends. This is not a criticism. In fact, Astro Bot feels refreshingly old-school in an era full of bloated, unfocused 100-hour slogs. But it does mean that there isn't actually much to talk about beyond the core mechanics. Which is a good place to start, because Astro Bot's core platforming mechanics are exceptional. The core running and jumping controls extremely well, but the real standouts are the power-ups that Astro gets. Some of these are carried over from Astro's Playroom, but a lot of them are new, and the game has such a large variety of power-ups that you don't stick with the same one for too long, with some of them only actually being in one level. In a way, this feels a bit wasteful, as these power-ups are so inventive and so (mostly) fun to use that it feels like they could've been reused a few more times, but it does ensure that you never get tired of each specific mechanic. The amount of variety on offer in just 20 hours is astounding. It helps that the levels are well-designed too. Structurally, they're fairly simple "Mario levels" but they're very well paced and designed, both from a core gameplay perspective but especially from a visual standpoint. Astro Bot has a large variety of different locales, and while some of these are your traditional "water level, beach level, jungle level, etc", there are a fair few surprises as well, and the game consistently looks excellent. The graphics aren't "realistic", but it's not trying to be, it's going for an appealing art style, and it nails that, with solid image quality to boot. As far as performance goes, it ran at a rock-solid 60 FPS. No issues at all with performance. A lot of the object physics in this game are very impressive as well, and the game takes every opportunity to showcase it. The highlight of this game from a technical level, however, is the music. While I don't think the soundtrack is *quite* as good as it was in Astro's Playroom, the music here is still exceptional, with some tunes that will be stuck in my head for a long time to come. Lastly, the game makes exceptional use of the features of the DualSense controller, features that have mostly been extremely underutilized in most PS5 games, even exclusives. From the patter of rain being felt in the haptics, to the gyro-controlled ball physics, to even the adaptive triggers on some abilities, the DualSense really enhances this experience, and it's a real shame that more games don't use these features. Another quick note, Astro Bot has possibly the best end credits sequence in video game history. I won't spoil it, but when you play it, you'll know what I'm talking about. Phenomenal stuff. Do I have any criticisms of this game? Frankly, yes, but I want to preface this by saying that none of these criticisms are *that* big of a deal, and they didn't even come close to ruining this experience. But they are there, and worth mentioning. Firstly... I didn't really like the combat. There isn't that much of it, but when it's there, it can feel a bit clunky at times, and a fair few times I died when it didn't feel like my fault, as the game didn't effectively warn me an attack was coming. You do die in one hit (outside of boss fights) but checkpoints are very frequent so it never feels punishing. That is unless you are playing one of the game's challenge levels, which have no checkpoints and require you to finish the entire (brief, to be fair) level in one go. Now, let me be clear, these are optional and you do not have to complete them to finish the game, only for 100% completion and the platinum trophy. However, they are frankly not very fun, and some of the later levels were extremely frustrating and required absolute perfection to finish. They also feel quite inconsistent, and more than a few times I died when it didn't feel like my fault. I got them all in the end, but it was by far the weakest part of the entire experience. Then there's the story. Now, let me be 100% clear. For a game like Astro Bot, this does not matter. At all. 3D platformers almost never have an interesting story, it's not the focus, and that's fine. This doesn't detract from my score *at all*. But, having said that... good lord this is astronomically (no pun intended) naff. The story is "green alien destroys Astro's ship which happens to be shaped like a PS5 (don't ask) and Astro must rebuild it by... finding parts of the PS5". That's *it*. There is no explanation as to who the green alien is beyond a name, why he hates Astro, or why the *hell* Astro's ship is just a PS5. The story in this game is so thin that I'd honestly argue it doesn't have a story at all, just a reason to divide the game into galaxies (for each main galaxy you complete, you get one PS5 part), and to shove in a lot of cameos from different PlayStation franchises... which leads me to my next point. Astro Bot, like Astro's Playroom before it, is *filled* with references and cameos to different PlayStation franchises. This made sense in Astro's Playroom, since its entire existence was to demonstrate the new features of the PS5, and merging "the old and the new" made sense in a free pack-in launch title. Astro Bot, on the other hand, comes 4 years later and retails at $60 USD, so a lot of the goodwill I'd have towards blatant brand recognition tactics doesn't carry over. While a lot of the cameos did make me smile, more often than not it felt like an exercise in marketing. It doesn't help that there are over 150 of these "cameo bots" to collect, so the game referencing yet another PlayStation IP eventually becomes less surprising and more inevitable, to the point where most discussion online has been about what franchises *didn't* get referenced than the ones that did. This has sparked a bit of discourse online, and whether you view Astro Bot as a loving homage to PlayStation's history or a glorified paid ad will vary based on your perspective. Personally, I lean towards the latter, and if the game wasn't so damn good in almost every other aspect, I suspect that the deluge of references would have bugged me a lot more than it did. But ultimately, none of these issues *really* matter, because Astro Bot is a fantastic game. It's just a *fun* game to play, in a time where it feels like a lot of the video game industry is disinterested in being... fun. The developer of this game was, like Astro's Playroom, Team Asobi, whose name quite literally translates to "play", which is very fitting. Every part of Astro Bot feels designed to be *fun to play*, and like I said earlier, it feels refreshing. Astro Bot is an excellent video game, one that is absolutely unmissable to every PS5 owner, and I strongly recommend it to everyone who has one. 9/10.