Astro Bot is like a toy you live with (and is the game of the year)
The Playstation exclusive won four awards at The Game Awards 2024. Here's our review.
2' min read
2' min read
On the surface, Astro Bot is a corporatist video game, celebrating itself, Playstation and the brand. It comes as a sequel to Astro's Playroom, a title pre-installed on the PS5 since the console's launch in November 2020 that was created to illustrate the potential of the new gaming machine. Artistically, it may seem like half a risk because you expect that geeky corporate outing atmosphere from PS history. Instead, the developers of Team Asobi have done brilliantly because they have turned what is known so far as the Ps5's little robot into a video game franchise that has nothing to envy from the big video game IPs.
We spent many hours on it and it is a proven demonstration of a great maxim of this industry: video games must be played in order to be judged. With Astro Bot, it's as if you had an interactive toy on your hands. For the first time when you hold the Sony DualSense controller, you realise the sense of adaptive triggers and tactile feedback. When you jump into a controller-shaped spaceship you can feel its thrusters firing. Glass breaking, wood, every material you encounter and break or move you feel it in your hands. When Astro is equipped with spring-loaded boxing gloves every component of those springy, clickable weapons makes the controller vibrate realistically. The wow effect is assured because for the developers it means being able to create new game effects.
As for the rest, it is reductive to call it a platformer even if the inspiration from SuperMario Galaxy and SuperMario 3D World is undeniable. The change of pace is in the gameply, because Astro Bot is a game that you feel in your hands and that rewrites some situations already seen with the Nintendo superstar.
Technically, then, the title is among the most ambitious on this year's Playstation. To rebuild his 'world' Astro Bot will be called upon to visit over 50 planets in 80 levels, 6 galaxies and 15 different abilities. The gameplay is varied and you will never get bored.
