Astro Bot Review – Fanservice Pie

Astro Bot Review - Fanservice Pie

PlayStation’s identity has felt a bit in flux as of late. Sure, when placed beside Xbox it appears as rigid and time-resilient as the mammoth triangular stone structures that stand proud in Egypt’s deserts, but compared to where it was a few years ago, it seems like it’s wandered inside those pyramids and has started groping around blindly in the dark. Sony clearly wants to turn its platform into games-as-a-service-central, but the surprise mega-success of Helldivers 2 has perhaps been undermined by the agonisingly predictable mega-flopping of Concord.

Until recently, PlayStation meant many things, but it mostly meant premier third person action-adventure games. It didn’t always mean this, though. The original Metal Gear Solid is the only game that could fully fit into this category in the original PlayStation’s top ten selling games, and there are two Crash Bandicoots directly ahead of it. It turns out that there is an abundance of riches when you delve into the history of PlayStation and view the trends generation by generation. For the most part, it’s easy to think that everyone at Sony has recently lost touch with this.

And maybe they have. That is, so long as you carve out an exception for those who work at Team Asobi.

Astro Bot is PlayStation fanfare dressed up as a 3D platformer; a more fully-fledged and robust building-out of Playroom – a tight little game that comes preinstalled on every new PlayStation 5 console. There are plenty of parallels to be drawn here, threads to be drawn between pack-in prototype and eventual full game, but the one that matters most is cynicism.

As with Playroom, this game should be cynical. It should be Out-of-Touch Cash-Grabby-Circle-Jerk: The Video Game. It should be the ultimate cumulation of board members making bad decisions in their Ivory Tower, telling the masses that they will buy regurgitated X, Y and Z because they loved it last time. It should be a naked, shameless advertisement sold back to us for money. What it should not be is a legitimate, playful celebration of more than two-decades of games. It certainly shouldn’t be brimming with creativity while also being polished to a blinding sheen.

A game that fits the boots that Astro Bot has been tasked with wearing should absolutely exist. That bit makes sense. The game that Astrobot actually is, however, should absolutely not. Thank fuck that this shit went in a direction that grinds against the colder logic of some of capitalism’s worse impulses.

Granted, this might come as more of a surprise if Astro’s Playroom and Rescue Mission didn’t already exist. The style of game and the quality of execution is, in this regard, at least somewhat precedented.

It all starts about as sensibly as it should. A bunch of adorable little robots are flying through space in a PS5-shaped ship, partying on the deck when a big green alien decides to spoil everything by tearing the ship up and scattering it (and its crew) across a series of small planetoids. This opening sequence is fast, fun, and a testament to understanding priorities: the goal here is to have capital-F fun, and what we’re presented with is minimal story told via maximum animation.

Holy crap, the animation in Astro Bot is good. In a world where we are so easily distracted by bounce-lighting and particle effects, texture detail and rounded edges, it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of just how high this kind of artistry can lift a game. Astro is expressive; the whole damn game is expressive. It looks right, feels right, and… feels right again. Remember when the DualSense controller and all of its tactile features seemed so promising? Yeah. It’s good to see/feel that old friend again. A notable part of this is personality and another part is novelty, but a third part is very evidently harmonising with the animation and control responsiveness to add to making every little thing that Astro does just feel so damn satisfying. Rapidly punching a boss’ weak point? Great! Drilling a hole in the sand or dirt or snow? Bang on! Slotting a reclaimed component back into your console-shaped spaceship? Goddamn perfect

A part of this has to come back to being a first-party Sony title, replete with the level of polish that this affords. For any fear that exists around cynical releases, Sony at least cares about how its first-party titles present themselves. I never ran into a single bug. At worst, throughout the ten or so hours I spent with the game (about 8 for main completion, another couple for some of the little extra tasks and challenges you find and unlock along the way, if that matters), I ran into about three seconds of noticeable slowdown. Total.

Astro is gorgeous. Aside from the aforementioned animation, the image quality is crisp, the effects and texture work both high-quality and consistent, and all of this with the only visual mode being a toggle for those with displays that can really crank up the HDR. There is no need to choose between performance or quality here. Astro Bot does both. And, aside from maybe the odd cleaner reflection or higher-quality shadow, I’m honestly not sure how it could do meaningfully better within the parameters it has set for itself.

Granted, a part of this is thanks to – as is perhaps befitting of a silly cosmic setup – Astro Bot smartly following the line drawn by games like Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey and allowing its worlds to exist in vacuums. Indeed, they are very much presented as small, discrete planetoids on the select screen. There is no pretence towards open-worlds here, very little level design that is built around wider exploration. Astro Bot’s stages typically follow mostly linear paths with the odd side-alley to explore, and these clusters of platforms tend to exist as islands surrounded by clouds, bodies of water, or just the purer vastness of space. This both allows for smart allocation of detail and a focus on tightly designed progression challenges that seldom fail to delight.

In fact, the only point where Astro Bot stumbles at all, at least throughout the core stages, is in its fondness of tilt controls, and even here it’s more restrained than Playroom was and the moments where they can frustratingly affect progress are both early on and short-lived. Never mind that the bits that it gets right, from simple playful touches such as flipping your robot pals about, through to surprise mechanics deeper into the game, border on the downright sublime.

Did I mention flipping your pals about? Rescue Mission may be the title of Astro’s VR title from 2018, but as implied by the staging of Astro Bot’s narrative, the core of this adventure, too, largely revolves around rescuing other little robots that got scattered around and trapped on these little planets that you fly between on an aerodynamic DualSense controller. Each stage has a handful of little pals scattered about that Astro must find and rescue. This is simply achieved by punching them, as you might one of the enemies waddling around the stage, but take a moment or approach them slowly and they will obligingly bend over so that Astro can boot them in the posterior instead, at which point they get sent flying into Astro’s ship controller, where they hang out and can, with a flick of your own wrist, get tossed into the air for a moment. It’s like goddamn charm in a bottle.

Alongside punches, Astro’s standard moveset of spinning and a hover-jump propelled by deadly lasers from his feet is carried over from previous adventures. Also carried across is the concept of picking up different abilities in the forms of gloves or backpacks, usually with entire stages designed around them. While the diversity here isn’t so great as for unique abilities to never ever get reused, it actually comes pretty close, and when specific abilities do reappear they’re usually accompanied by a new spin on their implementation or a satisfying test of the player’s mastery.

All of this, of course, is baked into a gobsmacking fanservice pie. The ultimate goal of the adventure is to rebuild a literal PlayStation 5 which sits central in the desert hub area where all of your freed companions – many of them dressed as characters of PlayStation lineage – hang out.  Even here there is some meat to be enjoyed: gacha toys to populate the space with, costumes to try on, paint jobs for Astro’s flying controller. Notably, there’s a handful of extra bots in need of rescue, and new areas that can only be explored with help from your new horde of minions (realistically, there’s little more to this than pressing a button, but watching a hundred little robots link arms to form a sky bridge for you to run across isn’t without its own appeal).

PlayStation 5 has another strange holiday season ahead of it. There is no Uncharted, no God of War; no tentpole Marvel title, nothing new from Kojima. Arguably, a lot of weight is being pinned on the shoulders of some big PS2-era Konami rebuilds. That is, so far as our current expectations on what a tentpole PlayStation game should be lead us to think. Maybe the respective Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3 remake projects will turn out to be great. Maybe you already know the answer to this at the time of reading, if not publication. I’m willing to bet that neither will be the standout PlayStation release for the second half of 2024, though.

Sadly, PS5 owners may simply have to prioritise their dollars for a more chipper title that, were it wearing a fake moustache and hat to try and blend in at the party, might be mistaken for an A-tier Nintendo platformer. I’m sure they’ll get over it.

Astro Bot was reviewed on PS5 with a code kindly provided by PlayStation Australia

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