It’s that every inch of Astro Bot is designed to offer a fresh experience. 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. It comes with a plethora of powers, but they never feel overused.
Pros Of Astro Bot
The prizes you get here, earned by spending the coins you’ve collected, more often than not, are attributed to one of the bots you’ve found, like a specific weapon or object that gives them a fun interaction in the hub. Other prizes include cosmetics for Astro himself and his Dual Speeder, letting you customise his look with some iconic outfits. You can also unlock the Safari Park, a special zone to hang out in, but it also gives you access to a simple Photo Mode, then usable throughout the game. There are some levels in here that almost had me pulling my hair out (in the best sort of way). But regardless of the difficulty scale, you feel so cool when you figure out the latest mechanics or platforming puzzle. It’s structured in a way too where if you want to dig into the difficult stuff you can, but if you want to keep things simple with the main campaign, you can also do that.
User Reviews
Strapping a penguin to your back will allow you to swim faster, whereas a dog on the back of Astro can propel him further. One ability that joins Sponge and Mouse in that it isn’t used much is the Teddy Cymbol, an ability that is really only injected into the game should you discover all the secret levels. While there are a few other abilities you’ll discover, they are used well enough in their respective levels but don’t really feature the same creativity as some of the ones I’ve just mentioned. Astro’s Playroom is just pure, unadulterated fun, and Astro Bot somehow manages to better it in just about every way.
Astro Bot Winter Wonder Bots & Presents Locations
Many platformers have done a lot over the years in abilities/level design/marketing not reaching people, more dialogue/combat/other crap & level design/movesets taking a hit. @Bluetrain7 Nearly every level has at least one Bot to rescue, including the challenge levels and secret levels. In order to get the Platinum, you need to rescue every Bot and get every Puzzle Piece. @rjejr I personally wouldn’t describe any of it as gimmicky; if I could compare it to anything, think of Super Mario Galaxy. Mario gets various power-ups throughout the game and often they only feature a couple of times — it’s like that.
Team Asobi clearly designed it for players of all skill levels, and that includes children and newbies, but at its core Astro Bot feels purpose-built for video game fans. It’s a skill-driven celebration of everything that makes the format so memorable and joyful, and at the same time, it’s an excellent introduction to the language of games. With precise and responsive controls, adorable characters, and an exciting variety of mechanics and environments, Astro Bot is easily one of the best games that Sony has ever produced. Astro Bot is a platformer adventure game released on September 6, 2024, for the PS5, serving as a sequel to Team Asobi’s Astro’s Playroom from 2020 and the third game in the series.
VR Bots make their return in the next title of the series, The Playroom VR. They appear in a much larger capacity in this game compared to the previous entry. The game introduces a group of four VR Bots, known as the VR 4, which serve various roles in the mini games as the playable characters for television players.
However, similar to Playroom, the team has built a huge range of power-ups and gadgets and then built entire level concepts around them seamlessly. kuwin of these are fun in their own right but the sheer variety and ease of use impressed me the most. Despite often radically altering your moveset, the game never resorts to tutorial text – just a small, animated pop-up indicating basic actions. There’s ample destruction as well – in the Japan-themed stage, for instance, a power-up involving a sponge is introduced. You can soak up water then spray it on flaming objects to put them out, similar to Kirby and the Forgotten Land. However, in giant sponge form, Astro Bot can smash through obstacles in a glorious display of destruction.
But then I remembered that communication between player and developer is not only what to do but also what to feel. And suddenly, it felt like they were hovering just over my shoulder, holding back their laughter as a dear friend would while they waited for me to get a joke. They’d intentionally held back an explanation because they wanted me to experience the feeling of figuring it out for myself. They wanted me to laugh, like I suspect they did when designing it. Like its predecessor, Astro Bot is filled to the brim with PlayStation references and cameos. The most visible ones come in the form of the Special Bots — bots dressed up as famous and obscure PlayStation family characters.
Yet I bet Astro Bot does significantly better than many titles that have spent years in development and cost double the price to make. I think this is clearly the frontrunner for game of the year now and it doesn’t look like there’s anything upcoming that has a chance of dethroning it. PS5 desperately needed this, now they need to reveal the big games 1st party is working on alongside the Pro and 2024 can be saved. I was expecting an average of 8s, but almost all reviews I saw are 9 and above. Punch the bottom bot in a Bot Tower at your Crash Site to knock one out without the whole tower collaping. You can find summon your Rescued Bots to form a Bot Tower at your main Crash Site area, near the column where you find one of the first Crahs Site Puzzle Pieces.
The only ability that doesn’t work as cleanly as others is the one used in an underwater level. Meant to mimic a dolphin-like dive ability, the controls used for this one never feel as intuitive as those for other abilities. In this level, I found it unusually tricky, albeit not exactly difficult, to collect all the secrets.
Astro Bot is a joyful platforming experience that soars thanks to inventive level design and countless loving nods to PlayStation’s rich history. It also takes full advantage of the PS5 and its use of the DualSense controller remains novel. If you’d like to take a peek at the secret character bots specifically, we’ve arranged a gallery of all the Astro Bot hidden cameo bots. For more on Astro Bot, don’t miss our guide on how to unlock the secret photo mode and read our review for this strong Game of the Year contender.
To gather console components and rescue our robo-friends, we must unlock specific galaxies and then the planets within them. Typically, when we land on a planet, we are provided with a tool that introduces new gameplay mechanics, offering fresh ways to complete each level. They add variety, keeping the game engaging and far from boring.
Suddenly, he’s attacked by an unsubtle-as-hell Xbox-green alien monster who trashes his ship and scatters its parts and his 300 friends to far corners of the universe. The result was Astro’s Playroom, a 3D platformer that was, once again, released as a free game designed to showcase a new piece of hardware. It came pre-installed on the PlayStation 5 when it went on sale in 2020. It was easily one of the best games available on the system at launch. To this day, its creative use of the DualSense controller’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers showcase what the controller can do better than pretty much any other game. Ever since it was first formed within Sony’s now-defunct Japan Studio, Team Asobi has put out one high quality game after another.
Still, it offered up a compelling level that was nonetheless engaging. Making your way through one star system after another, you might find your progress blocked unless you scour every level for the robots lost within them. There are 300 to find overall, with many of them depicting classic videogame characters. In that regard, Astro Bot can be seen as a celebration of not only Sony’s hardware and impressive catalogue of software over the years, but also video games in general.
You can try taking a picture as you may get lucky and they’re already close together, but if not walk over to either one and punch and kick them in the direction of the other. Once the two characters are near each other, snap a picture in Photo Mode (not the built-in PS5 screen capture) and unlock the Thick As Thieves trophy. To unlock this trophy, you need to find all three Golden Egg “artifacts” on the Dude Raiding world of Serpent Starway.