Astro Bot Review - Sony's Greatest Hits Collection Is Its Best Game In Years

Your expectations are probably wrong about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Astro Bot. Mine certainly were. I expected it to be a pretty fun little cartoon romp where the main draw would be pointing at the screen and going "Look! It's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nathan Drake!". What I got was one of the greatest platformers I have ever played, in terms of creativity, consistency, and cleverness, that just so happens to have a bunch of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation mascots inside it.

The greatest tribute I can pay to Astro Bot is that you forget about all of the PlayStation stuff going on while you're playing it. Sure, it's cool to see some forgotten classics in there (Wild Arms made the cut!), but you could take out the Kratos costumes and the game would be as brilliant as it is now. Though the nostalgia or PlayStation love in will eke up the excitement for some fans (and even put some off), it's not a pillar of Astro Bot, nor is it going to be the reason fans keep replaying this for years to come.

Astro Bot Is A Masterclass In Level Design

There’s a confidence to Astro Bot that makes it shine. It comes with a plethora of powers, but they never feel overused. There are four powers that only feature in a single level each. One of them is a set of cymbals that moves the platforms of the world around that other, lesser games m𒁃ight build their whole universe around. Astro Bot puts it in the final treat that you only get to even play if you beat every other level, including all the secret ones (and boy, are there a lot of secret ones).

It's like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:It Takes Two in how frequently it throws out a new idea, lets you enjoy it, then takes it away before it gets boring. But, unlike It Takes Two (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a great game in its own right), Astro Bot doesn't feature a single dud. Every power is interesting, has a meaningful impact on the level it’s a part of, and feels like it unlocks a new way to play. While some return from previous Astro outings and others are quite standard, there is a unique flair to how they feed into the level design here.

Astro Bot also does some things I've never seen other games use well, or even at all. The blending of gyro to control your rocket ship as you blast into levels before seamlessly switching to traditional play is a far cry from the clunkiness of early PS4 titles using the trackpad out of extremely obvious obligation. Even blowing into the controller to create bubbles or sound a horn, though obviously a bit of a gimmick, fits perfectly into the level each time Astro Bot uses them.

Gyro can be disabled as an accessibility feature i🐎f players pref𒁏er.

That is the true secret sauce that makes this a masterpiece. It's not that the powers are cool, that it’s fun to blow into your controller, or that you get to meet Aloy. It's that every inch of Astro Bot is designed to offer a fresh experience. Nothing is added in just because. It all fits together perfectly, with levels unfurling with surprising secrets that encourage exploration and always have an answer for a curious mind. Astro Bot might also be the most ASMR game ever with pitch perfect sound design that reacts to every single surface like no other game before. If you thought Playroom was a showcase for the DualSense, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Astro Bot Lets You Play As PlayStation's Biggest Legends

I feared it would be a bit of an advert for PlayStation dressed up as a video game - Sony's own Pepsiman here for the memes and little else. But even when Astro Bot leans into this side of the series, it's genius. One level has you transform into Kratos, Leviathan Axe and all, solving puzzles and freeing the likes of Thor and Freya from their snowy perils. When you become Drake, you get a pop gun for a completely fresh style of level that sees you finding hidden relics and climbing trees or shooting pirate skeletons to save Sully and Sam.

It takes you through deserts, across volcanos, inside dojos, to outer space, up mountains, down rivers, and both visually and mechanically, offers something new every time that always hits the mark. Bosses appear at the end of each cluster of levels and randomly in the middle, always with a new way of attacking that forces you to use powers in new ways, think differently, and experience the level in a fresh light. Platformers used to be this bold and seemed to shed that personality in favour of retreading safe old ground. But despite being a museum to Sony's past, Astro Bot is more concerned with looking forward, not backwards.

If Astro Bot has a failing - and that is an if - it may be in the enemy design. There are only a handful of baddies to bash aside from the bosses, and while they get a little tougher with tweaks to their attacks, this is the one area where it risks growing stale. Still, Team Asobi may argue its smaller complement of baddies that grow in complexity are what keep it consistent. It's a play straight out of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario's book, and in the platfo💞rming world, the plumber is still the king even as a new pretender climbs higher to the summit.

These occasionally repetitive enemies are also an important part of Astro Bot's difficulty. The main levels are never too tough - the real challenge is finding all the bots and collectibles - but there are special secret levels that test your skill. These have no checkpoints, so they're not for the faint of heart. Yet they never fall into the trap so many platformers do of cranking the difficulty up way beyond reasonable levels and changing the game's essence. Astro Bot can be punishingly difficult, especially the final gauntlet once you have every collectible in hand, but it never feels unfair.

Across my 25 hours fully completing the game and earning the Platinum (it took 11 hours to reach the main ending), I could count on one hand the amount of times I died and felt it was the game's fault, not mine. Even then, I'm probably lying to myself.

Catch Up With Old Friends In Astro Bot

It can be tough to critically gauge how 'good' a platformer is sometimes. With the exception of the truly bad ones, most of them achieve a decent baseline level of fun, because fun is all they're going for. You can enjoy them in the moment, and it's not until afterwards you realise it's an empty sugar high. But I am confident Astro Bot is not that. Platformers are my single favourite genre of gaming, with a rap sheet that includes every mainline Mario, Crash, Spyro, Jak, Ratchet, and Rayman game (not Sonic, sorry nerds), as well as odds and ends like Ori, Croc, Jumping Flash, Bubsy, and Klonoa. Across that lifetime of experience, I think Astr🌸o Bot is worthy of a medal.

You tend to start writing lines in your head when compiling a review, and one that stuck with me early was to call Astro Bot 'the best platformer since 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Odyssey'. Then I played a little more and started to think 'maybe it's better'. I don't know what I'd put after the 'since' now. All I know is Astro Bot is a contender for the all-time crown in a genre that has felt a little neglected (especially by Sony, who once nurtured it to greatness) in recent years. It's so much more than a PlayStation history lesson, and in climbing above those expectations, becomes a piece of PlayStation history in its own right - with Astro Bot, the PS5 may finally have arrived.