games / Reviews
Astro Bot (PS5) Review
Image Credit: Sony IE
Loading...I should start this review off by saying that I’m one of the few people who didn’t really “get” the hook for Astro’s Playroom. While I thought it was a neat technical showpiece, it just felt a little too shallow for my tastes. Well, now the team is back with a “big boy”, full retail product game and while it is fundamentally great, there are a few things that worry me.
Astro Bot is a 3D mascot platformer, in the vein of Super Mario 64, Spyro, or Crash Bandicoot. Funny enough, all three of these games are now owned by Sony competitors, but let’s not get bogged down by minutiae. As the titular Astro, you punch enemies, jump on top of them, hover around shooting leg lasers, all the while progressing through levels and rescuing your fellow bots.
The general story is that Astro and all the other bots are flying through space in their spaceship PlayStation 5, until an obnoxious alien damages the ship, steals critical parts, and forces it to crash land, scattering all the other bots through the galaxy. It’s up to Astro to rescue his friends, restore the spaceship to working order and put a beat-down on the obnoxious alien.
Here’s where the first of my big problems with Astro Bot come into play: the “story”. I say story in quotes because there really isn’t one. Astro, is what I would call charming, but he/she/it/whatever, doesn’t really have a personality. He merely just kind of dances around in spots, and that’s about it. Heck, Wall-E had at least a voice to go with his character.
That leads me to a larger issue. In Playroom, you could just kind of hand wave the plot off, it was a pack-in free thing, so who cares? Here, it’s more inexcusable. The bad guy of the game, is basically a non-entity. It has no personality, or goals, or anything, other than just being a dick.
I’ve tried arguing this point with a few friends and they don’t get it. One asked me “What platformers have an awesome story?” My response was “Uh, Ratchet & Clank, Spyro, Psychonauts, certain Mario games, Oddworld, Gex, Bastion, Braid, Sonic Frontiers, It Takes Two, etc.”
I’m not even saying that Astro Bot needs an “awesome” story. What I am saying it that it requires A story. Give me at least some motivation for wanting to stop the evil alien, or to collect your robot brethren. Why does Super Mario Bros., from 1985 have more of a story than a game that came out in 2024? But I digress.
If the story is lacking, the gameplay actually does make up for it. Playroom had a bit too many gimmick stuff, especially involving the motion controls. Bot, thankfully, tones this down quite a bit and actually has a lot more gameplay stuff going on.
Astro’s general mechanics, as described above, do remain the same. However, on most planets you come across, there is a power-up that confers a gimmick to you and you have to use it to get through the level.
One power-up gives you two extendo-arms that let you punch or grab enemies, another lets you slow down time temporarily, another lets you do a horizontal destructive dash, while another lets you do a vertical dash. Almost all the power-ups are fun, except for a “Monkey Hands” one, that has some really wonky controls for how you have to grab up platforms and climb them.
The basic crux of most stages is that you land in an area, go through the first checkpoint, collect the power-up and the “real” stage begins. Every main stage has both bots to rescue and puzzle pieces to collect. There is usually about 5 to 7 bots scattered in a level, while there are 2 or 3 pieces in them. Thankfully, the game tells you this up front and it is pretty easy to backtrack in most stages if you missed something.
You also collect coins, which you eventually use in their gotcha machine to unlock items for the rescued bots, new colors for your personal space ship/controller, and costumes for Astrobot himself.
Most of the power-ups, you’ll see 5 or 6 times during the game, especially the dash ones, or one that turns you into a small metal ball to roll around with. However, there are a couple of them that are pretty one-off. One is a penguin-themed power-up that lets you swim in water a lot quicker, one turns you into a sponge, letting you grow to bigger size and also expel water outward. Or one even lets you shrink down to the size of a mouse so you can gain a new perspective on a level.
Puzzle pieces, in the game, are usually a bit more hidden than a lot of the bots, so you have to keep more of an eye out. Bots, in levels, are spread fairly evenly, and while some might require a bit of searching, most of them you’ll find fairly easily. There are over 300 bots total, and they are split into regular ones and “special” bots. The regular ones are more generic, but the special bots are tied into famous Sony games throughout the PlayStation lifespan.
I do wish there was more of a Wikipedia/encyclopedia of the characters you find. Most of them are fairly recognizable like Snake from Metal Gear Solid, or Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil 2, but there are a handful that I don’t have a clue about. And having to read about it on some internet site doesn’t exactly thrill me. This could have been a more in-depth history/celebration of PlayStation games and characters, and it is only surface level, at best.
There actually is a legitimate reason to collect both puzzle pieces and bots in the levels. Puzzle pieces unlock new things to do in the hub world, like changing your Astro costume, unlocking the Gotcha machine, and unlocking a photo mode. Bots, you can use in the hub world to unlock things like more bots, or special items. You also use bots in the main level select areas to unlock the bosses of that zone. The first zone requires 20 bots for you to find, the second requires 60 bots and so on. So you do kind of have to find these things to make progress.
Speaking of making progress, there are two other levels you’ll encounter. In each main zone, there are hidden levels for you to find, usually by flying around in space, crashing into alien UFOs or asteroids. These unlock shorter levels that are usually a bit harder than the main ones, and require more platforming precision.
Also, in each zone, there are two levels that are hiding a “Portal” exit. If you find it, a new level will be added to the “Lost Galaxy”, which sadly doesn’t include Terra Venture. These levels are kind of smaller main levels, but a bit more specialized and unique.
If all that weren’t enough, after you beat the five main bosses of the game, you’ll unlock a final level for the zone. In these levels, you’ll encounter a special bot who will give you his/her weapon and then you’ll proceed through a level based on their type of game. These include: Ape Escape, Uncharted, Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and Loco Roco. These levels actually include mechanics from their core games, like you gain the net in the Ape Escape level and then have to hunt down the various apes and capture them. These are some of the best levels in the game, but sadly, there are only five of them.
The greatest compliment I can pay Astro Bot, and you might not think it’s important but it is, is that everything in the game is a solid object. They don’t fake anything in the game and it is a tremendous technical achievement that they pulled this off. Often times, you’ll find areas that you think you shouldn’t be able to get to, the tops of trees, or a slightly far off area and 10 out of 10 times, I would go there and find I could walk around and most points would even have a hidden coin for me to collect. There’s an area in a haunted level where a few ghosts start a whirlwind of various objects and you are meant to jump from object to object in order to get to them. I, intentionally, kept failing the mission, just because I wanted to see what objects were “real”, meaning they had a physical presence in the game, and which were “fake”, meaning they were just there to add visual flair to the game, or because it looked interest. IT WAS ALL REAL. I jumped from knife to spatula, to rocks that were almost pebble-sized and not only were they real, but you could usually hop to other stuff as well.
It’s not to say that the game doesn’t fudge a few things here and there. Some levels have extremely far off level elements that you literally could never get to, it’s just there to provide some background style. But if you can usually see it, you can physically interact with it and it just makes the entire game a more tactile experience than most platformers.
Aside from the lack of story/characters, there isn’t too much else bad I can really say about the game. Some levels are extremely challenging but perseverance is key. I was able to kind of blitz through the game in a few days, from getting it to getting the platinum trophy in it, and thoroughly enjoyed my time. Considering that there really hasn’t been an all-around total package platformer since Mario Odyssey, or at best, Psychonauts 2, this is an easy and obvious pick up for any fan of the genre.
