Here’s what you can earn by collecting Astro Bot’s many collectibles, and the many, many easter eggs to look out for. At its core, Astro Bot is built on the technical foundation of Astro’s Playroom. Using its own in-house technology, the design objective seems clear – to deliver a smooth platforming experience at 60 frames per second while dazzling the player with physics and pyrotechnic effects at every corner. From a technical perspective, the execution is virtually flawless. It’s not something we can often say about new games but in this case, the experience is so bulletproof and polished that it feels as if the team perfectly achieved what they set out to do.
The sequel to a simple pack-in game is a flawless love letter to both PlayStation’s history and video games in general. Team Asobi is the last remaining bastion of Japan Studio, the historically creative Sony studio responsible for the likes of Ico, LocoRoco, Gravity Rush, PaRappa the Rapper, and many, many more offbeat classics. Japan Studio was sadly dissolved in 2021, with many of its staff folded into Team Asobi to make Astro Bot.
Accessibility Features
Stranded in space following an attack from a googly-eyed alien, Astro’s mission is to repair their ship and rescue all 300 pals scattered across five main clusters of planets, each composed of individual levels. Naturally, the story is not the focus here, and yet I was so immersed in the 15-hour game that I beat it in two long sittings. It may be 2024’s most immersive game, and it achieves that without a line of dialogue. Instead, each level tells a story, clear as day, about where you ought to go next and what you should do there. According to Jamie Smith, Team Asobi’s Principle Animation Director, the animations of Astro and other characters in the game have been drastically increased.
Soccer Player – This Is Football
If this, alongside new titles like Lego Horizon Adventures, signals a new and less stuffy direction for Sony, then I’m excited to see what the future holds. For now though, you’ll find me trying to 100-percent Astro Bot, cursing and laughing the whole way through. Vicious Void is a galaxy that unlocks after clearing the main game. It contains special challenge levels, and each of them contains a Special Bot to unlock.
Customers enjoy the game’s challenge levels, with puzzles being a key feature, and one customer noting that they are just the right amount of difficulty. Customers find the game incredibly engaging and fun to play, with one customer noting that the themed levels include unexpected gimmicks. Go behind the scenes in this five-part series with Team ASOBI to discover how their philosophy of “All About PLAY” created a super-sized space adventure game for everyone. Preview some of the 50+ planets Astro will visit on his grand rescue mission.
Astro’s adventure takes him to various galaxies full of planets to explore as he tracks down his scattered crew. This part of our Astro Bot guide goes over each and every level in the game, highlighting where to find all collectibles and more. Every level brings something new, and the controls feel perfect. The bright graphics and little PlayStation references make it even better.
Some of this stems from Team Asobi’s enthusiastic use of the DualSense’s rumble, haptic triggers, and speaker. Some is rendered by Team Asobi’s astonishing, virtuosic command of the PlayStation 5 itself; Astro Bot is a tech marvel, perhaps the best-looking PS5 game to date. The sheen of the surfaces, slosh of the liquids, scale of the levels, and smoothness of the frame rate are stunning. The physics, as Astro sets piles of hundreds of shiny apples tumbling, or wades through a pool of gold nuggets, are just showing off. Unlike ASTRO’s Playroom, ASTRO BOT is a standalone, full-sized adventure that offers over four times more worlds, 300 bots to rescue and dozens of new powers and features to discover. Selected by a combination of jury vote and public opinion, this is widely considered one of the most prestigious awards in the video game industry.
Astro Bot Rescue Mission
Unlike most of Astro’s previous outings, this is a full-sized game, with over 50 planets for you to explore. It’s available to buy in physical and digital form, plus in a digital deluxe edition. Read on to see what comes in each edition, how much it costs, and more. And in case you’re wondering if it’s any good, you can put those questions aside.
They even announced that the game will be receiving free DLC in the near future. If there’s one thing to criticize, it’s the exclusivity and the need to buy a PS5 to experience this masterpiece. Everyone should be able to experience this kind of fun, as with the amount of games there are, it’s only a few games that really go the distance. As a platformer, Astro Bot is definitely the best to come this year. The fun factor is unparalleled for a game of this genre, despite it’s obvious simplicity. The biggest thing to take away from the game is how well it uses the DualSense to its advantage.
The unbridled joy I felt when firing up a game I’d never seen before came flooding back to me. I remembered why games were so important to me growing up and how they shaped my creativity. Naysayers will say that no childhood memory comes from sitting in front of a TV, but that was never true for me. Astro Bot still takes advantage of the console’s power too, but not by dipping into photorealism or needlessly flashy spectacle. Incredibly smooth performance means I’m never taken out of the flow by frame hiccups.
The first is the role that video games play in many people’s lives. If 2020’s Astro’s Playroom was like a museum – albeit one with fun playable exhibits – Astro Bot is like a theme park, throwing a new thrill at you around every corner and after every double-jumped gap. It doesn’t always deliver the bonkers creativity that drives the likes of Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey, but that’s hardly damning criticism when swings of that size are rarely taken outside of Nintendo’s walls. What developer Team Asobi has designed here, though, does successfully evoke the spirit of those great platformers by birthing novel stages full of visual flourish that never cross the line into becoming mere novelties. For 30 years, Sony has given us a vast library of top-quality PlayStation games, but there has never been a mascot platformer among them to rival the heights that Nintendo’s Mario regularly reaches. Packed with dozens of colourful levels and experimental abilities, Astro’s latest outing thrusts him onto centre stage, joined by a supporting cast of PlayStation’s past heroes to provide hours of pure joy.
Platformers like Kirby and the Forgotten Land are at their best when they’re introducing new ideas that consistently surprise players. They tend to lag in their back halves when they’ve played all their cards, but have more levels to go. Even luck8 into that in its final world as it begins repeating power-ups and enemy types. It doesn’t have trouble keeping its double dips to a minimum, though.
Arriving September 6, 2024, Astro Bot is a direct sequel to Astro’s Playroom and looks to bring all its colorful platforming and more to a full-fledged game. Astro Bot is only confirmed for PS5 so far but so were a hoard of other PlayStation exclusives now available on PC. Sony has made a point of expanding its player base and sales by bringing franchises such as The Last of Us, God of War, Spider-Man, and more to the platform.
The formula for creating great platform games always involves carefully aligning disparate pieces to create a cohesive and engaging whole – and Astro Bot is no exception. It does but that’s just recycling mechanics or aspects from those games, it’s not that original, it doesn’t fill in gaps those games don’t offer either regardless of platformer then horror, RPG or open world contexts. 10/10 — OutstandingThe pinnacle of a given genre at the time of release, these titles raise the bar in virtually all critical categories. You can be sure that a game awarded this score has the highest quality presentation and expertly honed gameplay, but also breaks boundaries and pushes the industry forward in a meaningful manner.