Astro Bot

How do you quantify charm? How do you measure delight? Is it possible to reach a maximum state of fun?

As a video game reviewer, Astro Bot has caused me to ask these questions. When I say a game is the most charming, the most delightful, the most fun, how can I express those concepts without sounding hyperbolic? Maybe I should stay away from such hardline concepts as ‘the most’, and stick with direct comparisons to existing games.

Astro Bot, the new platformer from Sony studio Team ASOBI, has Legend of Zelda and Mario levels of charm. It has surprise-birthday-party-with-all-your-lifelong-friends levels of delight. It is as fun as a day at an amusement park (maybe more so, now that I’ve gotten older). This game has laser-jumped to the top of my personal chart of platformers, leaving all others in its colorful dust.

Though this is the first full length title in the Astro Bot series, it is clear that Team ASOBI has been doing this for a long time. And indeed, Astro Bot feels like a combination of 1/3 remixed greatest hit mechanics from the series’ previous entries and 2/3 wildly creative new ideas that have never before made it off the white board. Every thing this team has been holding back is now on full display, and it is glorious to experience.

Both of the previous entries (PSVR’s Astro Bot Rescue Mission and PS5’s free pack-in Astro’s Playroom) were amazingly polished and tight platformers. Astro Bot takes the successful Bot-friend-collection mechanics of the previous titles and blows them out to the Nth degree, expanding the game in every possible direction.

There is a story of sorts here, but it doesn’t matter all that much, beyond saying that it is amusing. The bottom line is that Astro’s PS5-shaped ship has been disassembled by a bad alien. The ship's vital parts and Astro’s bot buddies have been scattered across several solar systems, each comprised of around six planets and a boss planet. Players must guide Astro through the planets in each system (essentially the game’s “levels”), before taking on the final boss planet – which then spawns an additional PlayStation-themed planet where Astro can recover the missing ship parts.

Each of the planets/levels in these systems is completely unique to the others, with its own theme and mechanics. Yes, there is a lava world and an ice world, but Astro Bot goes far beyond these tropes with some very clever and original settings. While Astro maintains his basic spin attack and laser-foot double-jump from the previous games, this new title gives him all sorts of new and exciting temporary powers to play around with. There’s the frog-mittens that extend his punches, or the chicken backpack that launches him skyward. The penguin that allows him to swim quickly underwater. You get the point. I don’t want to list anymore, because the powers are super exciting to discover on your own.

Also exciting are Astro Bot’s secrets. When speaking with a Gaming Nexus colleague who was also playing the game, I commented that Astro Bot “hides secrets inside secrets”, which is absolutely true. There are hundreds of discoveries small and large to be made in Astro Bot, from little touches hidden in the nooks and crannies of each level designed to surprise and delight the player, to approximately double the worlds in the solar systems that initially appear to be there. You could feasibly fly through the game and miss half of the content if you weren’t taking the time to poke around, doing yourself a severe disservice. Take your time. Find the goodies.

The interesting thing about Astro Bot is that the game wants you to discover its secrets. It encourages the player to mess around while flying the solar systems by dangling things in front of them, and it subtly telegraphs the secrets contained in its levels, some of which are so diabolical that I’ve felt like an absolute genius figuring them out. For those that might want a bit of assistance, the second time you enter a world to “clean it up”, you can spend 200 of the game’s coins to pick up a little bird friend, who will chirp handily when an undiscovered secret is nearby. It’s a very player-friendly mechanic and is purely optional for those that want to partake in it. Purists can stick to the old tried-and-true “move slowly and pan the camera constantly” technique.

The bot buddies Astro is rescuing are also a revelation. I knew that the game was going to dig into Sony’s history, but I wasn’t expecting the depth that I’ve found here. I keep bugging the Gaming Nexus staff with my finds, just because they are so jaw droppingly deep. Again, I don’t want to put a list in my review, as I want players to be able to be delighted on their own. But I found Quill, the mouse from Moss, for goodness’ sake. When I say the roster is deep, I mean it is DEEP.

These discoveries all gather in Astro Bot’s hub world, which itself has – you guessed it – a ton of explorable spaces, with puzzles, activities, and secrets of their own. When I say that Astro Bot delights, this is where it delights the most. Using your spare change to get goodies out of the Gacha Machine, you bring your bots to life, adding animations to each of them that call back to the characters’ original franchises. It’s a hoot, and a heck of a way to make you feel like you are actually earning something when you are going out of your way to snag coins.

I’ve been playing through Astro Bot this past week concurrently with my children (we each have our own save file), and it’s been fun when they pull ahead of me to allow them to share some of the stuff they’ve discovered. And I gotta admit, they have uncovered some things that I don’t think I would have found on my own. They have also proved to be slightly more adept at platforming than I am, which fosters a simultaneous sense of pride and chagrin.

Indeed, I have sometimes found my platforming skillz pushed to the limit. Astro Bot is deeply accessible, with very forgiving checkpoints and unlimited lives, but not everything here is a walk in the park. Though most players will find the game’s mainline planets to be reasonably beatable, once you start exploring the game’s optional worlds, you’ll find some real challenges. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this game is all cuteness and light – you will experience some barn-burning platforming if you explore enough. I treated my wife to an endless cascade of curse words the other day while I attempted one 90-second level over and over for about an hour before beating it. Astro Bot does indeed get real.

This game is also a fantastic showcase for the now-aging (I can't believe I just typed that) PlayStation 5. The use of the Sony DualSense controller in Astro Bot is quite frankly unparalleled. Before this, the game where I noticed the controller’s functionality the most was Returnal, but Astro Bot is wildly more creative. The use of the controller’s speaker for sound effects is simply superb (though you might want to tap that volume down a bit; you’ll have to do that in your system’s settings, there is no setting in the game). The sound effects are expertly selected and deployed to make every footstep, swim stroke, and ball crash in the game feel as though you are guiding a real bot through a real world. The combination of sound and DualSense’s advanced rumble features add a tactile nature to the game that I’ve not experienced before. It’s all new and weird, but it also feels very natural and right, if that makes sense.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the game’s soundtrack, which is so damn catchy that I’ve found myself humming the songs while cooking in the kitchen. Do yourself a favor, and occasionally put on a headset while playing this game. The controller sound effects seamlessly move to the headset, and you’ll get a much better sense of the artistry in the music. It’s a phenomenally good soundtrack.

Astro Bot has captivated me and my family like no game ever has before it. Competition in my home for controller time is at an all time high. I’ve literally had to force my children to set a timer so they could take turns playing – the current rule is “thirty minutes, then you get five minutes to finish the level you are on.” Though I’ve now run through the game’s primary storyline, there are still numerous challenges and worlds that I’m still poking at, as I plan on playing this game to 100% completion. A creation this stellar deserves nothing less.

And, for the record, I'll just go ahead and say it. Astro Bot is the most charming, the most delightful, the most fun family-oriented game I've ever played. And both of my kids have pronounced Astro Bot their "favorite game ever", completely eclipsing the Fortnites and Minecrafts of the world. So much for worrying about hyperbole. This game is the best.