Fans of bits and pieces are going to absolutely love Astro Bot. It’s made of bits and pieces. Lots of these bits and pieces are nostalgia: you pick between old memory cards when choosing a save file, you’re rewarded at the end of a boss fight with a spell of Ape Escape monkey-netting fun. Look close at most surfaces and you’ll see some variation of the DualShock face buttons imprinted on it. Look in the sky and you might catch a passing reference to Fantavision.
Astro Bot reviewPublisher: SIEDeveloper: Team AsobiPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out on 6th September on PS5.
All great. But what I really love about Astro Bot is that it’s also just filled with . Stuff to roll around in, stuff that forms little piles that can be kicked about. I’ll punch a tree and end up showered in falling fruit. I’ll open a chest and there will be lumps of gold rolling around at the bottom. In one completely dazzling level I was given a magnet, and soon I was vacuuming up metal bars by the dozen and spray cans by the hundreds, all ready to form a bait ball I could fling at a distant target. Another early level set me loose in a whipped cream winter wonderland and I spent five minutes just pacing through individual sprinkles the size of footballs, hundreds and thousands of hundreds and thousands scattered deep on the ground.
There are jokes about tech demo ducks in here, then, but there’s also the sense the whole thing is, on some level, a huge tech demo. I mean that in the best way. It’s a sustained tech demo, one that never runs out of new wonders to show you, new marvels to fling at you and swiftly discard. Previous Astro Bot games have been employed to showcase new bits of kit. This one’s different. It feels like Sony is trying to channel its whole spirit into this game. Astro Bot is a glimpse of what Sony wants you to understand that it believes that it is. It has the boundless cheer of a group of people coming together and trying to be their best selves.
More importantly, perhaps, it’s fun. Astro Bot is a really, really good 3D platformer. As is often the case with the blockbuster genres of yesteryear, it’s always nice when someone busts another one of these out, particularly when they put in so much effort to make it satisfying, curious, lavish and pleasantly odd. This is a hard genre to get right, too, even though on the surface it’s just running and jumping. Firstly it’s hard because it can feel like Nintendo’s already done everything already. Secondly it’s hard because making these games must be a bit like making a comedy. People always say that making comedies is the absolute worst. A drama, you can tell whether it’s dramatic. But how can you tell, in the moment of creation, if a comedy’s actually fun? Ditto kicking trees and being buried in fruit, or stomping through piles of hundreds and thousands. There must be a voice echoing quietly in each designer’s head going, “Yes, sure, in principle this is entertaining, but is it really going to stand up?”
1 of 3 Caption Attribution Most levels give you a gadget to play around with, whether that’s a penguin jet pack or monkey hands for grabbing certain hold points. The game never really runs out of new gadget ideas.
Astro Bot’s solutions to both these problems are entirely winning. The Nintendo thing? It just embraces it. Astro Bot’s already a trip backwards through PlayStation history – the demo ducks, Ape Escape, the Fantavision nod. But it is, inevitably, a tour of some great Nintendo memories too. So many platformers are by their very nature. The game seems to acknowledge this with a shrug: what are you gonna do? Nintendo already did everything! So if a classic low-level Astro Boy enemy looks like a Goomba, why not? If a set-piece reminds you of a moment in one of the great 3D Mario games, just let it be part of the richness of the whole affair.