Score: 5/5 stars
I almost exclusively play Nintendo games, which makes it incredibly surprising that the PS5-exclusive Astro Bot has become one of my favourite games of all time.
Over the last few console generations, the PlayStation brand has become known for its suite of hyper-realistic games that often place a heavy focus on storytelling. It’s largely for this reason that AAA PlayStation releases have slowed down; these games take a long time to develop, meaning it’s difficult to release more than one or two per year.
Enter Astro Bot, a whimsical 3D platformer that breaks the conventions of what PlayStation has become known for. Not only does it deviate from the typical PlayStation formula, but it’s exactly what the PS5 needs.
Rather than prioritising long cutscenes or story beats like other major PlayStation exclusives, Astro Bot places its gameplay at the forefront. The game wastes no time throwing the player into the fun: within five minutes, you’ll find yourself soaring into the game’s first stage, a gorgeous series of mountain peaks above the clouds with a flock of flamingos flying right beside you. This moment sets the tone for the adventure: it’s going to be a thrill of a ride, and the game will make sure you enjoy every second of it.
The gameplay in Astro Bot is similar to what you’d expect from a 3D Super Mario title à la Super Mario Galaxy or Super Mario Odyssey. With your help, the adorable Astro Bot must traverse intricately crafted stages while defeating enemies and finding collectibles on his way to rebuild his spaceship, a gigantic PlayStation 5 console (no, I’m not kidding) and defeat the giant alien who attacked his ship.
The game has a simple and silly plot that doesn’t mean much while you’re actually playing through the game, and that’s okay. It’s not meant to be a deep narrative; it’s simply a thread meant to give purpose to Astro Bot’s adventure, and the game completely embraces this gameplay-first focus.
The stages in Astro Bot are wonderfully designed and incredibly clever. During your adventure, you’ll encounter interesting locations that are even more unique than those of Super Mario titles.
In one stage, you’ll work your way through a sky-high construction site, traversing cranes and bulldozing your way to the end of the stage. Another stage sees Astro Bot thrown into an oversized world where he must explore a gargantuan bedroom. Yet another brilliant stage throws the little robot into a huge casino where you jump on oversized falling poker chips to work your way up. The game is full of surprises and delights, and it never takes its foot off the gas for even a moment.
While exploring the stages, you’ll want to search every nook and cranny for the collectible Hidden Bots. These lost bots are castaways that were thrown off the PS5 mothership during the alien attack, and it’s your job to bring them back home. There are several Hidden Bots across each stage, and many are hidden in wonderfully clever locations. Some of them will require a keen eye to find, but their hiding spots never feel unfair.
Speaking of Hidden Bots, you’ll quickly notice that many of them are dressed up like various famous characters from across PlayStation history. While I didn’t personally catch most of the references due to my unfamiliarity with the console’s history, it was great to see all of these games referenced and tied together in such a fun way. With so many references to PlayStation across the entire game, Astro Bot feels like an homage to the brand and honours its history in a way that will delight longtime fans while remaining approachable to newcomers like me. In other words, being knowledgeable on PlayStation history will likely enhance your enjoyment of the game, but it’s certainly no requirement to have a blast playing it.
It should go without saying, but as a first-party PS5 exclusive, the game looks and runs incredibly well. Its graphics and framerate are wonderful, and the loading time after dying on a stage is virtually non-existent — it throws you right back into the fun in no time.
Especially cool usage of the PS5’s computational power is seen whenever the game loads in plenty of small objects that can be kicked around. In one stage, the game drops hundreds upon hundreds of apples on the player, and you can have fun kicking them around or running through them. The system tracks the location of each apple, so they stay wherever you kick them. Running around and playing with these objects doesn’t do anything to advance the story, but it’s an incredibly fun and satisfying use of the PS5’s raw power.
Another excellent use of the PS5 hardware is through the controller, the DualSense. The DualSense dynamically responds to different situations, making various sounds and providing unique haptic feedback depending on the situation. The controller’s adaptive triggers are used creatively, providing resistance when pushing on the L2 or R2 buttons in situations where it makes sense. These might sound like inconsequential additions, but they go a long way in making this a game that truly honours PlayStation and places fun at the forefront.
As aforementioned, Astro Bot clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Super Mario titles, especially Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel. Certain levels feel like they were torn straight out of a Mario game, such as the ones where you must roll around on a ball through a floating labyrinth, just like the levels from the Galaxy games with the exact same mechanic.
This has caused a debate online as to whether Astro Bot went too far in its inspiration, but in this reviewer’s opinion, there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other developers as long as you bring enough new content to the table. And this is something Astro Bot fully succeeds at. The game takes the best parts of Super Mario games and puts its own spin on them before presenting them in a deliciously fun package — and that’s not something to complain about.
All in all, Astro Bot is nothing less than a triumph and it deserves to be considered amongst the greatest games of all time. Hopefully, this game will show Sony that not every game needs an enormous budget or 10 years of development time to be something special. Astro Bot isn’t just out of this world — it’s exactly what the PS5 needs.
Astro Bot is available now exclusively on PlayStation 5.
