February 19, 2025

Recently, I have played a little bit of the 2024 Game of the Year winning Astro Bot. I wanted to offer my quick impressions of the game after playing the first few hours!

Polished Platforming

3D platformers is, sadly, a smaller genre than it once was. While the genesis of 3D gaming saw many different companies and studios take a crack at designing their own 3D platforming game. Sure, Mario has always been the king of platformers, but a few generations ago, it felt like every console had several platforming series.

That’s not the case today. Outside of the big Mario game we get every few years and the occasional Sonic remaster of varying levels of quality, indie developers are really the only people keeping this genre going consistently. Well, now there’s Team ASOBI too.

Astro Bot had his debut title on PS5 in Astro’s Playroom: a simple, quick tech demo that showed off what the PS5 (and arguably more so what its controller) could do [Note: technically, there were other stuff with Astro Bot before this, but this was the first title to bear his name and be available outside of VR]. However, last year Sony released Astro Bot, a sort-of spiritual sequel to Astro’s Playroom, although now it is a full, standalone platforming adventure.

It feels like a sequel in the sense that a lot of the elements present in Astro’s Playroom, but it’s all dialed up to 11. You still play as Astro as he platforms his way through levels filled with puzzles and challenges that require the player to use various features of the PS5 controller. However, besides just including more content, the biggest thing that differentiates Astro Bot from its predecessor and some of its contemporaries is the amount of polish. Levels are beautiful, intuitive, and fun! Astro Bot, while maybe differing from other platforming mascots, controls super fluidly and his power-ups feel well-thought out and gameplay changing.

Fun, fluid movement is huge for me in video games, especially in platformers, so I really enjoy simply running around with him. Maybe the only game design decision I dislike is how lives work. In many 3D platformers, your character will have a few hit-points before you ‘die’ and are sent back to a checkpoint or the beginning of a level. In Astro Bot, though, you only have one hit point. So even with a power-up, if you take one hit, you’re sent back to a checkpoint. Luckily, this is somewhat balanced out by the fact that checkpoints are aplenty, plus major boss fights give Astro three hit points. What I don’t like, though, is that this really takes the momentum out of certain moments. While respawning at a checkpoint is pretty quick, the way some checkpoints are set up just completely take the momentum out of a stage for me. This feels especially bad when you just make a small accident or get hit by something out of frame.

I enjoy the elements of challenge present, especially in the challenge stages. But from a moment to moment gameplay perspective, I think that life system is the only thing that can be a bit of a drag. But for the most part, Astro Bot is super well-designed and fun!

Nostalgia Overload

I’ll be honest, I am a big PlayStation fanboy. My favorite game of all time, Persona 4 Golden, was originally a Sony console exclusive, and the wider Persona series as a whole is pretty widely considered a PlayStation franchise. Plus there are tons of other PS series I adore. Spider-Man, Ape Escape, Bloodborne, Ratchet and Clank, the list goes on. A lot of my earliest video game memories even are from the PS2, where I would play Star Wars Battlefront with my family and friends constantly.

With all of that being said, yes, the PlayStation nostalgia does get to me a little bit. While I get what some people are saying with stuff like “it sucks that this is all Sony does with beloved dead franchises,” I gotta say, it at least makes me happy to see these cute versions of characters and games I love all come together. I’ll always be a sucker for stuff like that. And while maybe the Sony love does reach propaganda levels at some points (I mean, the bots’ ship is LITERALLY a PS5), I must say, I adore the little bot versions of characters.

Conclusion

Astro Bot is a ton of fun. And having played a few of the Game of the Year nominees, I can very easily see now why Astro Bot won. It’s crowd pleasing, polished fun that basically anyone can enjoy. If you can check it out, I’d really recommend it! It’s one of the best platformers I’ve played in recent memory, and I’m excited to keep hunting for Astro’s friends.

Stay tuned for maybe a full review of Astro Bot one day. Potentially!