Astro Bot Review – A Perfectly Made 90s Platformer

Astrobot He has a long history of bringing the best innovations to PlayStation, whether it’s crammed inside the Dualshock 4 or Game Room or Astro Bot was there to let you see the best that Dual Sense had to offer. Now, in his own full-length adventure, does Astro Bot’s fun and crazy platforming and nostalgic antics continue?

Join Astro and 300 other Astro Bots as they chart the stars in their PlayStation 5-themed spaceship. It’s not long before the joyous journey is interrupted by an alien who steals key components of the PS5, forcing the spaceship to crash and hurling all but one of the Astro Bots across a series of galaxies.

Super Astrobot Galaxy

Astrobot It is a 3D Platformer that draws heavy inspiration from the 90s games that brought PlayStation to this day.

Starting with the wreckage of your spaceship on a sandy hub planet, you’ll have to make your way to the stars. Visit galaxies full of full and small levels to rescue your lost companions. While most of these are just generic Astro Bots, many feature popular franchises, first and third parties.

Each level also has a secondary objective, puzzle pieces that unlock new features in the hub world, and secret exits in some levels that take you to bonus levels in the Lost Galaxy.

Like a treasure hunt, you will be dropped into these different worlds, fighting strange robotic enemies and rescuing Astro Bots. No matter what you search every nook and cranny of the world, you will be rewarded.

Even if you can’t find an Astro Bot or Puzzle Piece, you’ll still earn coins that can be spent on iconic items for your PlayStation-themed Astro Bots, or you can use those coins to make it easier to find missing collectibles.

I have a deep love for classic PlayStation platformers, particularly Spyro and Crash, so I loved how each level progressed. Astrobot full of colorful environments and creatures. As a fan of collectibles, I also appreciated that the game lets you complete each level 100% on your first try.

Astrobot does a great job of tricking players into missing collectibles without spoiling the fun of exploration. If there are seven Astro Bots in a level and you take out the first two and then suddenly have a fourth, you know that somewhere after the second and where you are now in the level, there’s another Astro Bot that needs your help.

This is a great way to keep players searching for secrets without having to leave the game or receive explicit instructions on where to go.

Each level is relatively short, lasting around 10 minutes. This makes the game easy to pick up and put down, but also leaves you saying to yourself ‘just one more level’.

Some of the smaller levels, especially those tied to the PlayStation controller’s four face buttons, present a real challenge to fans of fast-paced platformers. You’ll need to time falling ice paths, swinging from hazards, and enemies that force you to get past them.

Platforming as Astro Bot is an absolute joy. In his base form, you can run around, jump, hover/glide with foot lasers, and punch as Astro Bot. Many levels add new abilities to Astro Bot’s move set in fun and engaging ways.

The Monkey gives you two arms to reach switches and climbing frames, the Bulldog launches you horizontally to reach new places, and the Chicken blasts you vertically.

Astrobot It Happened and Once Again It Was the Best Double Emotion Game

Each of the additional move sets in Astro Bot use the Dual Sense controller’s haptic triggers, and some, like the monkey arms when climbing, even require you to twist the Dual Sense left and right to shift Astro Bot’s weight.

Outside of power-ups, you’ll also use your Dual Sense’s motion controls to play with the controller as you collect new Astro Bots and soar through the levels.

I’m not normally a fan of Dual Sense’s additional features, mostly because I feel like they’re just added for the sake of having it and not to provide any real benefit to the game. Many implementations of ‘Dual Sense for the sake of’ give me that feeling like I get when I’m watching a movie and see a character’s hand reach towards the screen as a ‘for 3D viewers’ section.

Inside Astrobot Considering Astro Bot’s use as a ‘tech demo’ in the past and how little fourth wall-breaking the game has, it makes sense that so many Dual Sense features would be included in the game.

A Love Letter to PlayStation’s History

During Astro Bot’s Playroom It was a love letter to first-party franchises and PlayStation hardware over the years. Astrobot is a love letter to all PlayStation games. You’ll see cameo appearances and references to existing series God of War Ragnaroklike retro titles Parappa Rapperand multi-platform games featuring characters Resident Evil, Street Fighter, and much more is emerging.

There are even themed stages after each Galaxy boss fight, exclusive to a single franchise, where you not only experience the setting of a game, but new mechanics are introduced that allow Astro to truly run a mile in another character’s shoes.

The game is aware of how deeply it’s diving into the well of nostalgia, but it does so well that it’s hard not to smile at every reference you come across.

Once you’ve collected different Astro Bots from around the world, you’ll arrive at the hub world where you can actually cash in on the nostalgia. Each game-themed Astro Bot has its own place in the hub world, and they’re usually grouped with characters from the same game. You can also get different accessories for them using the Gatcha mechanic.

It’s one thing to see Jax running around, but you should also make sure to unlock a mechanical Daxter for him.

You can also work with your unlocked Astro Bots to reach new areas and open special eggs filled with non-Astro Bot references like Spyro the Dragon or a retro robot dog toy. While it was fun to see so many Astro Bots working together, sometimes it took an unnecessarily long time for them to come together. I know that 120 Astro Bots working together is a lot, but if I could summon them all at once, I wouldn’t have to wait for Astro Bot Atreus to catch up to finish the job.

Astrobot Review | Final Thoughts

Astrobot It has managed to perfectly recreate what made platformers from the 90s so special. The fun and whimsical worlds are a joy to explore and never feel out of place, and a player’s desire to hunt for secrets is amply rewarded.

While recreating classic platformers in this way may seem like a simple idea, it shows why 3D is so popular. Mario While the games’ popularity never waned, other 3D platformer series went astray when trying to add too many features.

The Astrobot The players who will really get everything out of this game will be those who have been with PlayStation since the beginning of PlayStation. Those who will see an Astro Bot based on Astro Bot IQ: Smart Qube and they have flashbacks to a strange gaming experience on a demo disc they haven’t thought about in 25 years. It’s a heartwarming trip down memory lane.

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Astro Bot was reviewed after approximately 14 hours of playtime on PS5 with a publisher-provided copy – all screenshots were taken during the review process.