After testing the water with VR experiments and pack-in demos, Astro Bot ($59.99) finally gives Sony’s adorable robot a full-fledged PlayStation 5 adventure. The wait was worth it. Astro Bot turns three decades of PlayStation history into a celebratory cosmic romp. But even if you can’t tell Kratos from Clank, Astro Bot is a creatively ambitious and marvelously successful 3D platformer in its own right. It’s easily an Editors’ Choice winner for PlayStation 5 titles and one of the best games of the year.

Astro Bot's Gameplay

Astro Bot's premise may seem familiar if you played the free Astro’s Playroom demo that launched with PS5 in 2020. In it, you help the cute, mechanical mascot reconstruct Sony’s ugly behemoth of a console. But Astro Bot soon reveals its greatly expanded scope. The quest takes you to six galaxies, each roughly the size of the original Astro’s Playroom. The journey should take close to 10 hours to complete.

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Any cosmic 3D mascot platformer immediately invites comparisons to Nintendo's Super Mario Galaxy. So it’s impressive how much Astro Bot holds its own against one of the greatest games ever made. Like Super Mario Galaxy, Astro Bot uses its interstellar setting as an excuse to delight players with dozens of immaculate levels and bite-sized excursions where developer Team Asobi explores their wildest ideas and polishes them to a sheen. Some ideas are more innovative than others, but you can’t help but be bowled over by the variety.

For example, you can charge through a crumbling construction yard, glide over a sea of clouds, water a sprout and climb the singing tree that emerges, and navigate sandy deserts before rubbing a genie out of a lamp. The sandbox levels are large and invite exploration, while tight corridors beg you to become a speedrunner. Some assets seem repurposed from previous Astro games, but Astro Bot’s clean and colorful cybernetic aesthetic is beautifully rendered and runs well on PS5, with bouncy particles and expressive animations. 

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It's a joy making it to the end of each level, but you’ll want to stop and poke around before doing so. Each level has hidden, friendly bots to discover, plus the occasional portal to secret stages. You’ll need to discover a minimum number of bots before unlocking new areas. Finding bots requires paying attention and appreciating just how much thought has gone into each environment.

It’s just a bit annoying that Astro dies after only one hit. The game isn’t difficult, and checkpoints are numerous, but resetting after just a single slip-up discourages exploration. Besides levels, you can also explore the map screen to reveal challenging bonus stages.

Potent Power-Ups

Astro’s standard moves include a jump, hover technique, and a punch you can charge until it becomes a spin attack. Those tools alone don’t offer quite the same platforming finesse as Penny’s Big Breakaway or Super Mario Odyssey. Still, Astro moves with fluidity. This relatively simple foundation gains much more depth thanks to the game's brilliant power-ups.

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Astro’s Playroom gave Astro a handful of temporary abilities, and some of them return here. However, Astro Bot introduces even more. Beyond just mere gimmicks, some of these powers could sustain entire platformers in their own right. The Mouse power lets you shrink and grow at will to find new pathways. The Snake power extends Astro’s arms to hit faraway switches or turn himself into a slingshot. The Elephant backpack sucks up goo that Astro can later redeploy as a personal platform. Less memorable are occasional gameplay sections that leverage DualSense controller gimmicks, such as adaptive triggers and motion controls. Thankfully, they're easily ignored.

Astro Bot’s designers are smart enough to comfortably guide you through the wackiest mechanics, so you feel like a genius by the time you’ve mastered them. Several powers are featured in multiple levels, but this feeling of mastery especially comes into play during the game’s titanic boss fights. Featuring the outrageous spectacle of a PlatinumGames production, these mechanical monstrosities had me hooting and hollering while pushing Astro's powers to their awesome limit. One boss shoots a series of blinding fast blades at you, and the solution is to freeze time and walk on the projectiles until you reach the next arena. It rules.

PlayStation All-Stars

Astro Bot’s core gameplay is strong enough to shine on any platform, but it's also an unapologetic love letter to PlayStation hardware and the iconic games that have graced those systems over the years. The Sony nostalgia unifies the charming presentation. PlayStation symbols cover coins, and recovered spaceship parts represent the PS5 architecture.

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Meanwhile, numerous bots you rescue cosplay classic PlayStation characters, from first-party studios and third-party partners. You can find Lara Croft sneaking through ruins, or relive multiple Naughty Dog titles with bots themed after Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us. I loved watching my robot collection grow like a colony of worker ants, as they helped me reach new areas in the hub world. You can also score accessories, like a cardboard box for Solid Snake to hide in. You can also customize your own bot with a jacket from Bloodborne or give your DualSense-shaped starship a retro makeover. 

Astro Boy’s desire to be a living gaming history museum recalls Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and it goes deeper than just cosmetics. A handful of stages are designed as theme park-esque recreations of famous PlayStation franchises (and even casually emulate their gameplay). For example, an Ape Escape stage tasks you with capturing simians, while the God of War stage offers a magic axe. With their mix of new mechanics and familiar faces, these sequences proved Astro Bot's most exciting elements. 

(Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment/PCMag)

If anything, Astro Bot’s infectious enthusiasm for all things PlayStation accidentally highlights how disappointing the brand has become (for me, at least) in recent years. There’s something incongruous about seeing this mascot dress up like interchangeable, gruff sad dads from endless “cinematic” third-person shooters.

Along with praising PlayStation’s past, Astro Bot offers an appealing and imaginative alternate future for what AAA PlayStation games could be. It would be fantastic even on a Nintendo console full of steep cartoon-like competition. On PlayStation, though, Astro Bot is a singular lifesaving oasis in the middle of a desert. No disrespect to Sackboy.

Verdict: Astro Bot Is Out of This World

I never quite agreed with the effusive praise for Astro’s Playroom. It was, at best, a well-made tech demo. However, it laid a fantastic foundation that Team Asobi has thankfully poured an entire real game into. Astro Bot fulfills nearly all of the enormous potential lying dormant in this series all along. It honors the PlayStation heroes that came before it and carries the torch for inventive 3D platforming. For that, Astro Bot earns our Editors’ Choice award for PlayStation 5 games.

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