I never thought Astro’s Playroom would get a standalone sequel. When Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a new Astro game with a cool trailer featuring an all-new badass-looking controller, I got excited. Team Asobi, the team behind The Playroom that featured the newest PlayStation mascot, Astro, has yet again captured my heart with its incredibly adorable follow-up to the free 2020 game.
Astro Bot features a ton of new characters, locales, puzzles, and easter eggs that hardcore PlayStation fans will truly appreciate. While Astro Bot is basically the same framework as Astro’s Playroom from the ground up, the huge amount of content is something that makes it different from the 2020 free title. Astro Bot is a love letter to all Gen-X and millennial PlayStation gamers.
Astro Bot offers a simple, yet admirable, plot where a green, space alien bully dismantled the PS5 mothership and hid all the five major components into different milky ways. Your goal is to find not just the critical internals of the PS5, but also your bot brothers and sisters. As Astro, you have to go through different biomes that showcase the console’s visual prowess, features of the DualSense, 3D audio, and platforming and puzzle-solving galore.
That’s the biggest highlight of Astro Bot, its world and surprises. From the snowy plains of Frozen Meal to the dunes of Trapped in Time, there are even underwater locales with an abundance of activities to do and secrets to find. With over 50 unique biomes to explore, Astro Bot has never been this fully realized. Team Asobi has shown what they are capable of, making Knack, from the already shut down SIE Japan Studios and directed by Mark Cerny, look pale in comparison to Astro Bot.
Much like its predecessor, Astro Bot sticks with the same combat mechanics with the basic punch and spin attacks, prolonged jump with lasers coming out of Astro’s feet; and similar exploration beats as the first game, however, there are also lots of new tools for Astro like the bulldog backpack that thrusts you towards enemies and obstacles destroying them in an instant; there is even a modifier in one of the biomes where Astro becomes a sponge that allows him to absorb water which transforms him into a huge Astro-sponge. While these are tools to overcome obstacles in most biomes, they make Astro Bot entertaining and overall enjoyable to play.
It’s also worth noting that Team Asobi perfectly implemented the use of the DualSense’s haptic feedback and adaptive trigger gimmicks than ever before. The feeling of each ground Astro steps on is more nuanced, and the L2 and R2 triggers feel more responsive when firing an automatic weapon.
Astro gets to encounter new types of enemies and enormous bosses along the way. These newly added adversaries deliver unique combat situations that I enjoyed a bunch, and what made it exciting were the boss battles. While these huge bosses you encounter at every final biome in each galaxy are easy to beat, Team Asobi made clever, nuanced boss battles that made each experience thrilling and fun.
Astro Bot isn’t just your typical platformer, no. Much like Astro’s Playroom, the game lives within the PlayStation universe, bringing in characters that we all know and love, and in Astro Bot, it doesn’t just bring in cameos, you also get to rescue and interact with them in the hub where all the bots gather — the Crash Site. The Crash Site, much like PlayStation Labo in Astro’s Playroom, is a hub where you can freely explore, interact with the bots, see your unlockables, change your Dual Speeder’s look, and even Astro’s costume. Yes, you read that right, you can now change Astro’s look with your favorite PlayStation characters; while limited, is still a great feature.
The term “PlayStation heroes” isn’t just limited to Sony’s first-party titles, they include characters from the popular third-party franchises that took the brand to new heights like Resident Evil and OctoDad, and even Devil May Cry. There are a ton of franchises from the early days of the first PlayStation to the PlayStation 4 era for you to find and I won’t spoil them for you in this review.
Astro Bot triumphantly brings back all the memories I had when I was a kid, from button-smashing the Square and X buttons in hack n’ slash games like God of War on the PS2 and getting afraid when hearing zombie groans from off-screen in Resident Evil on the PS1, I have never felt so happy to have experienced such greatness from games that helped me through my struggles in elementary and high school.
Performance-wise, Astro Bot is as smooth as butter. The game greatly utilizes every feature of what the PlayStation 5 can offer, similar to what Astro’s Playroom did in 2020. While it’s still a visual spectacle, I can’t help but notice some minimal frame drops in boss fights when huge explosions happen, but other than that, Astro Bot is a breeze to play.
Astro Bot not only drives you back down memory lane, it also successfully captures your heart by bringing your beloved franchises into one, big adorable package that brings a lot of experiences back from the depths of our core memory. Astro Bot is lovable, charming, and most importantly, an incredible game.
