PS, I love you.
Fans of bits and pieces are going to absolutely loveAstro Bot.
It’s made of bits and pieces.
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 review
All great.
But what I really love about Astro Bot is that it’s also just filled withbits and pieces.
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.
I mean that in the best way.
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.
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 might 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.
Astro Bot’s solutions to both these problems are entirely winning.
It just embraces it.
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?
As for the is-it-fun thing, Astro Bot’s solution is even more winning.
Instead of one idea per level, let’s have a hundred.
Let’s have a new idea every few seconds.
Let’s keep it coming.
Let’s get busy by getting working.
All great, all rituals.
But in between all that?
In between all that Astro Bot will do almost anything.
An entire level set on a dream of 1930’s skyscraper construction sites!
Creativity can be two things you sort of understand combined in a way you didn’t expect.
These levels feel so Nintendo-like because they get everything out of their ideas.
If you’re heavy and metallic can you roll on spikes?
But what if the spikes were only part of the problem?
Astro Bot is a platformer that genuinely thinks like the best platformers out there.
It anticipates the things that you will anticipate, and then goes one better.
It’s a whirl, inevitably.
It’s boss fights when you expected them and boss fights when you absolutely didn’t.
Or you’re able to choose to go it alone.
And when it’s done?
When it’s all done I’m left with that strange feeling of being very well cared for.
I’ve seen a bunch of wild sights.
I think, more than anything, of all the glorious bits and pieces.
Review code for Astro Bot was provided by Sony.
