Most people were introduced to Astro Bot in Playroom, the bundled title that came with every PS5 back in the foggy past of November 2020. For a freebie, Astro’s Playroom was a lot of fun and successfully showcased everything special about the PS5 and the new DualSense controller. Four years later, Team Asobi are back with Astro Bot, a fully-fledged platformer that borrows more than a little from the likes of 3D Mario. The question is, does Astro Bot cement itself among the lofty heights of the genre’s best? Or has Team Asobi failed to prove they can be more than a corporate pack-in?
While travelling across the stars aboard a PS5 spaceship, a big, green, goofy looking alien stops Astro Bot and friends in their tracks, steals all the components of the console, and hides them throughout multiple galaxies. It’s your job to complete levels in each galaxy, rescue fellow bots and collect puzzles pieces and coins, and finally defeat the resident boss and reclaim each missing component.
This game is gorgeous and runs with a solid frame rate essentially the entire time. Colours pop, the animation is sublime, and the overall fidelity is super impressive for a platformer. This was to be expected, Astro’s Playroom looked and ran great four years ago, but the complexity of the physics took me by surprise. The sheer amount of things on screen and how they interact with each other, all without a frame being dropped, is truly mind-boggling.
Liquid physics are in full effect, water, honey, lava and other miscellaneous goop will naturally trickle down slopes and bounce off other surfaces. Most impressive, however, is the instances where a ridiculous amount of debris made up of individual objects like petals, metal scrap, gems among other things, will absolutely blanket an area. It’s pure joy to run through a pile of gems, with the tactile ‘plinking’ sound and haptic rumble coming from the controller, swinging Astro Bot’s fists and watching all these jewels go flying around and bouncing off each other. It certainly feels ‘next-gen’.
Thanks to the absurdly quick load times, levels are able to break apart and transform before your eyes. Whether it’s a sprout bursting into an enormous tree, buildings collapsing into one another, or a giant boss emerging from the ground, Astro Bot is determined to keep your jaw on the floor for the duration.
An overall feeling of polish and responsiveness permeates the whole game. Running, jumping and punching all feel great and the DualSense haptic feedback is incorporated into directly into the gameplay. There are certain sections where you have to move along a wall and wait to feel a certain jolt, which is how you know you’ve found the secret panel to push in.
There are several abilities Astro Bot will acquire in certain levels and boss fights. These include devices that allow him to suck up material to create his own platforms, fly through the air (one horizontally and another vertically), slow down time and more. These are incorporated into the levels wonderfully, always showing up at just the right time to keep things fresh.
Structurally, Astro Bot is very similar to Super Mario Galaxy, or perhaps more specifically Super Mario Galaxy 2. There is a galaxy map that you can zoom around on your DualSense speeder, travelling from world to world. There’s a hub level too, called the Crash Site, where all your rescued bots, including those that hail from many, many different PlayStation (and associated) IP. As you collect puzzle pieces various buildings will sprout up, including the Gatcha Minigame from Astro’s Playroom, and a building each for changing the colour scheme of your speeder, and for changing Astro Bot’s outfit.
Progression is gated between galaxies by how many bots you’ve rescued, and exploring the Crash Site fully will require an ever-increasing number of bots. In Pikmin style, at specific locations you can call the bots over to assist, they will then zoom together to create bridges, ladders and ropes to swing on, allowing you to explore previously unreachable areas of the Crash Site.
Whereas Astro’s Playroom focuses on the history of PlayStation hardware in all its various iterations, this time around, Team Asobi has gone in hard on IP. You’re collecting bot-ified versions of famous (and not so famous) PlayStation IP and populating the crash site with them. Of course the heavy hitters like God of War, Uncharted and Horizon are there, but there are also plenty I didn’t recognise, so I suspect there are a lot of deep cuts.
Spending coins at the Gatcha machine will unlock character-specific items, which enables a cute little animation for each character to show off. These range in complexity and in their relevance to the IP they stem from, but the majority of them are a lot of fun to witness. (Kazuma Kiryu’s from Yakuza was probably my favourite, no surprises there). Collecting bots and decking them out with their special item is a fun distraction, and is like having a shelf of toys come to life.
The soundtrack really knocks it out of the park. It somehow manages to hit all the notes a bright and jolly 3D Platformer should hit, while also feeling reminiscent of the somewhat nebulous and long absent PlayStation identity of the late 90s. There are plenty of earworms here, including some I couldn’t help hum along to as I was playing.
It is hard to fault this incredibly polished, unadulterated and spectacular platformer. That said, I was a little let down by the final secret hard level. Traditionally (i.e. in Mario games), hitting credits in a platformer is just the beginning, and the really tricky stuff comes after seeing everything else the game has to offer. Astro Bot does have one tricky level tucked under its sleeve for those who reach 100%, but it pales in comparison to even the simplest final levels in Mario games. This is obviously not going to be an issue for everyone, but it was a minor disappointment for me.
Secondly, and this is something that could probably be its own article, but there is something about Astro Bot that manages to feel like an ad, to some degree. Yes, it’s undoubtedly a celebration of all things PlayStation, but it also seems designed to entice new players to existing franchises. Do you like the look of Aloy Bot and her robot dinosaur buddies? Why not check out Horizon? Like the cut of Kratos’ jib? Then please take a look at God of War, on sale now!
Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I started this review invoking the name of Super Mario Galaxy, and such a comparison requires scrutiny. Super Mario Galaxy (and indeed Odyssey) could also be called celebrations of a franchise, and it’s history, but I never felt like I was being sold something else while playing it. There’s a lot of fun and nostalgia to be had with Astro Bot’s collectathon, but it certainly toes the line between celebration and advertisement.
None of this really detracts from the fact that Astro Bot is a phenomenal 3D platformer. It may not have quite the same magic as a Mario game, but it comes pretty damn close. Dazzling visuals, responsive controls, groundbreaking physics, charming collectibles and a banger soundtrack make this a must-buy for any PS5 owner, and indeed any fan of 3D Platformers. Astro Bot has earned its place among the greats.
Rating: 9/10
Astro Bot was reviewed on PS5 with a code provided by PlayStation.