"Astro Bot" Review

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Team Asobi

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for)

Me and Astro Bot go way back. All the way back to his origin as a Playstation VR demo game, to be precise! The cute little guy's adventure was one of the highlights of that year in a year already stacked with highlights. Then, there's was Astro's Playroom, the Dualsense Controller tech demo on new PS5s...which I didn't play much of because it just didn't have the same spark as Astro Bot Rescue Mission on PSVR. But regardless of that slight misstep, I was looking forward to Mr. Bot's first ever full-length adventure! And everything you've heard is true: it's an absolute delight to play. And it just so happens to have come out at the perfect time...if you've read my past couple reviews, you'll know that I've been having a rough go of it recently. Astro Bot came out the day before my sweet girl passed, but I still had some Black Myth: Wukong to go on the release date. So, at the end of the worst day of my life, I fired up Astro Bot as my way of trying to distract myself. I'm glad to say that it more than does the job if you're going through something tough...and if you're just having a normal day, I can only imagine how much more joyous it is! I'm terminally allergic to sentiments like "this game saved my life" and things like that, but I won't deny that Astro Bot was there for me when it counted, and were it not for the massive barrier to entry that is its PS5 exclusivity, I would recommend it to anyone. So, I'll be doing my normal review here, but I'll also be doing a little section at the end to discuss what to expect or be aware of if you're thinking of getting the game for your kid for Christmas or something like that...obviously there's no gore or sexual content, but I do feel like I ought to point out what parts might end up being frustrating and other things to consider when kids are involved. So, let's get to it!

In Astro Bot, you play as the titular Astro Bot: the new poster child for the playstation brand. As he flies through the cosmos in his spaceship, surrounded by hundreds of other little bots, the crew is ambushed by a big green alien (who probably looks and sounds like your kid), who rips the ship apart and scatters its major components to the far sides of the universe. So, after crash landing on a desert planet with just his speeder and the ship at its barest, Astro Bot embarks on a journey to the five major galaxies in the area to recover the pieces of his ship, rescue his friends, and show the evil alien who's boss!

Now, people have had one complaint about this game, and it's an aspect that I don't view as a negative, but it's absolutely a thing to bring up: the whole game is a glorified advertisement for the PS5, which you already own if you're playing the game in the first place. The ship? It's a PS5. Astro Bot's speeder? It's a PS5 controller. Astro Bot's friends? Most of them are dressed up like iconic Playstation characters. The pieces of the ship that you're trying to recover? They're things like the SSD, the fan, etc. So, the game is a GIANT product placement. Does that negatively impact absolutely anything at all? Of course not! Does it make it a little laughable that the final confrontation is essentially "we'll show YOU to try and steal all the Sony Playstation (a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment LLC and Sony Entertainment Partners PLLC, All Rights Reserved, Copyright Sony 2024) brand family of products and keep them for yourself!!!!"? Of course! So, it's going to be on your mind a lot, but it isn't really a complaint. 

In fact, one of the big joy factors is recognizing the characters you end up rescuing. For example, I've been playing a lot of Bloodborne this year, so I was delighted when I rescued a bot dressed up in the Yharnam Hunter's gear in one level. But even if you don't recognize a single outfit, I have it on good authority you'll enjoy yourself anyway. It's just that you'll get that much more out of it if you've played a couple of the games that are referenced. After you rescue a bot, it'll take up a space in your base of operations and do something its character is known for if you interact with it. To give an example that isn't a spoiler because it was in all the marketing material, one bot in dressed like Kratos from the recent God of War: Ragnarok. If you interact with him, he'l get angry and freeze you with his axe. If you interact with a bot that looks like Kazuma Kiryu, on the other hand, you'll start to see progressively bigger and bigger items fall out of his pockets. So, these aren't huge things and they obviously don't affect anything, but they're just extra bits of love to get excited about.

So, gameplay, how about it? Well, this is a platformer in the vein of the 3D Mario games: your whole goal in a given level is to reach the end of that level. You'll do this by jumping between various platforms, avoiding enemy attacks, avoiding obstacles and environmental hazards, and occasionally doing a level-specific action. I'm ultimately going to save a lot of the gameplay talk for the section at the end about kid friendliness, as most adults who are aiming to get this for themselves already know what goes into a platformer. But for now, I'll say this: the platforming itself controls excellently. The bot's little foot lasers provide an excellent sense of where you are in the 3D space (meaning if you're jumping between little platforms above an abyss, you'll be able to tell if you're safely above the next platform thanks to those lasers), which is a necessity for me, as my depth perception goes right out the door in some of these games. So the fundamentals are solid, and when those aforementioned level-specific actions get added in, that just makes them all the better. In the first level, for instance, you get a device that lets Astro Bot blow up like a balloon to fly up a certain amount from where he's standing. You'll then use this ability to navigate the challenges of the level, and as the game goes on, you'll end up experiencing more and more little gadgets like these and more and more creative applications of their use.

But beyond just the platforming itself, there's also collectibles (as tends to be the case in games like these). Obviously, one of those collectible types is those other bots I mentioned in the last blurb. In most levels there'll be 7 of these bots hidden throughout, but in some there'll be variable amounts, and in boss areas and some fringe cases, there'll just be one or two. We'll be returning to those fringe cases in the kid section. Aside from the bots, there are also three puzzle pieces for most levels (and only two for certain ones). These puzzles pieces fit together to unlock various rewards in the main planet hub (such as a dressing room to change your bot's outfit, for example). Finally, in two levels per galaxy, there are little portals to find. These portals take you to the "lost galaxy," which is home to those special two puzzle piece (and five bot) levels. So, in any given level, there's plenty to do other than just jumping and fighting enemies.

Now a note on the technical side of things....it's perfect. Objectively so. The visuals showcase the power of Sony funding, the performance is top notch and never falters, textures are enticing enough to make a person like me feel like tasting some of them, the music is joyous and earwormy, the sound effects are satisfying, the bells and whistles of the controller are utilized to great effect, it's just a perfect report card. And all of this is true despite a frankly obscene amount of minute detail added to every little thing. The example a lot of people are using is that sometimes you'll hit a tree and a million individual apples will fall down and make individual noises as you walk into them. In lesser hands, this would feel in poor taste...but when the technical package is as good as this one, it's hard not to admire the sheer amount of love that went into the details.

So, now a little something for the parents reading this and thinking about possibly getting Astro Bot for their kids for Christmas or something like that. There are a couple thoughts I had while playing that I'd like to address.

1): As I said before, you're not going to find anything objectionable in this game, so don't worry about that....but some of the games referenced in here are a different story. Each character is referred to with a vague descriptor, not their actual name, and the games they're from aren't shown. While some have speculated that this is a legal thing should Sony lose ownership of any of these IPs, I think an equal argument can be made that this decision was made so kids wouldn't be able to easily find some of them. Take the Yharnam Hunter outfit I mentioned earlier. The Yharnam Hunter outfit is one of the coolest outfits of all time (deep black colonial garb). I can see a kid unlocking that outfit and wondering what game it's from because it looks so cool. Then you have a five year-old asking for Bloodborne for Christmas, and we don't want that! So, you can easily act like you don't know what something is from, but I'd say to be prepared to do some research if your kid shows interest in something enough to figure out the title. A lot of these IPs are just as family-friendly as Astro Bot, but being careful about that is what keeps a five year-old from watching in horror as werewolves tear him apart in his cool new colonial garb!

2): This game has an overarching theme of being kind to your PS5. The evil alien, for instance, colors on the protective plates that make up the exterior, so when you rescue those plates, they look sad and you have to clean them off. That's a good lesson to teach kids, respect of property and all that, but if you have a particularly inquisitive kid, they might end up curious about the insides of the console. Throughout the game, you open up the console and re-install the pieces that you rescue, and I have no clue how accurate any of it is...but I could see an inquisitive kid wanting to take the dang thing apart to try it for themself, and then there's $500-600 potentially down the drain! So if that's your kid, it might be worth discouraging that from the get-go.

3): Every thing that you fight in this game is a robot of some kind. That being said, all of the non-alien bosses look convincingly like animals. There's a gorilla, an octopus, a cobra, a chameleon, and a bird, and without the knowledge that these are robots, these boss fights can potentially be upsetting to a kid who is especially sensitive about animals. I can picture a little me being sad about knocking all the gorilla's teeth out, for example...REMEMBER, it's a robot, not an actual gorilla, but just like with the last point, if this is your kid, it might be worth making that extra clear. Better yet, maybe look up one of the boss battles on youtube and see for yourself.

4): This is not a difficult game by any stretch of the imagination. Checkpoints are extremely frequent, only an incredibly small subset of enemies can harm the player, and most environmental hazards are telegraphed pretty well. So unless your kid is really impatient, you likely won't have to deal with any kid frustration for most of the levels....

Most of them.

Starting with the second galaxy, you have the ability to unlock four challenges per galaxy, each based on one of the PS5 controller buttons. One galaxy might have four square challenges, while the next has four triangle challenges, in other words. These are the levels that only have one bot to collect, with that bot being the prize for coming out victorious. These levels also have no checkpoints and are made up almost exclusively of enemies and environmental hazards, resulting in challenges that were kind of frustrating even for me on occasion. I legitimately have a hard time imagining a kid being able to do some of these, and I'm not the first critic in the collection of critics I follow to say so. The reward for completing these exceptionally harder challenges is meager, as I already said, so it really isn't worth the frustration and anger that it might cause a kid. Again, you know your kid better than I do, so do with all of that information what you will.

5): You might not realize this going in, which is why I want to point it out. Some levels require specific actions with the controller, and some of those actions are too finnicky for me, an adult. Things like motion controls and the like. Maybe it frustrates your kid. Maybe your kid gets too into moving the controller around and keeps knocking a chair down. I don't know. Either way, you can disable all of these from the accessibility screen in the options menu and have these actions happen just by using the sticks on the controller. If you're a non-gamer parent especially, I don't know if that's something you'd necessarily realize going in.

6): This isn't a "thing to look out for," rather, it's a logistical detail. I 100%-ed this game twice, and doing so took something like 20 hours. A first run-through was something like 10-12 of those hours, but I'm a big boy. So if you're wondering if you're going to be getting your money's worth in terms of keeping your child occupied, obviously your mileage may vary. If your family is anything like mine was growing up and each kid only has an hour a day, then if you factor in the fact that kids are just naturally going to take longer to do anything, a basic playthrough might take a couple weeks, perhaps. More than that if they want to try and get all the bots or unlock all the rewards from the little claw machine you spend your in-game coins on. And hell...I played it twice, so it's possible it'll be the gift that just keeps on giving!

Folks, do I even need to drag this out any further? Astro Bot is just a delightful experience from top to bottom, technically perfect in every way, and really the only barrier to entry is its console exclusivity. But if you have the hardware (or are planning on getting it), I can see no good reason why you shouldn't give this little blue guy your time. You'll thank me later!

With nothing to take off for, the final score for Astro Bot is 2024's third...

10/10 - Masterpiece

Excellent work, Team Asobi, excellent work!