Astro Bot review – a wildly generous delight

Fans of bits and pieces are going to absolutely love Astro Bot. It’s made of bits and pieces. Lots of these bits and pieces are nostalgia: you pick between old memory cards when choosing a save file, you’re rewarded at the end of a boss fight with a spell of Ape Escape monkey-netting fun. 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.

All great. But what I really love about Astro Bot is that it’s also just filled with bits 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. In one completely dazzling level I was given a magnet, and soon I was vacuuming up metal bars by the dozen and spray cans by the hundreds, all ready to form a bait ball I could fling at a distant target. Another early level set me loose in a whipped cream winter wonderland and I spent five minutes just pacing through individual sprinkles the size of footballs, hundreds and thousands of hundreds and thousands scattered deep on the ground.

There are jokes about tech demo ducks in here, then, but there’s also the sense the whole thing is, on some level, a huge tech demo. I mean that in the best way. It’s a sustained tech demo, one that never runs out of new wonders to show you, new marvels to fling at you and swiftly discard. 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. As is often the case with the blockbuster genres of yesteryear, it’s always nice when someone busts another one of these out, particularly when they put in so much effort to make it satisfying, curious, lavish and pleasantly odd. This is a hard genre to get right, too, even though on the surface it’s just running and jumping. 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 can 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. There must be a voice echoing quietly in each designer’s head going, “Yes, sure, in principle this is entertaining, but is it really going to stand up?”

Astro Bot’s solutions to both these problems are entirely winning. The Nintendo thing? It just embraces it. Astro Bot’s already a trip backwards through PlayStation history – the demo ducks, Ape Escape, the Fantavision nod. 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? If a set-piece reminds you of a moment in one of the great 3D Mario games, just let it be part of the richness of the whole affair.

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.

And so, while there are rituals within this game, they stand out because of the endless variation and imagination. You arrive and leave each level riding on a PS5 controller, for example, and the controller pops up to store each of the seven little bots you can find scattered around each level. Each zone of the map ends with a big boss fight, and then a palette cleanser level that goes deep on an existing Sony video game series. There’s a hub back at the centre of it all where the bots you’ve rescued mill around and can help you unlock new areas and new trinkets. All great, all rituals. But in between all that?

In between all that Astro Bot will do almost anything. Whipped cream wonderlands! Japanese architecture! An entire level set on a dream of 1930’s skyscraper construction sites! Many of these things are platformer standards, but that’s kind of the point, because the game always chucks something in to warp it and make it fresh. Creativity can be two things you sort of understand combined in a way you didn’t expect. So that construction site level, for example, has you hopping between gantries and girders and swinging wrecking balls about, but it also gives you a giant magnet that turns the material world into glittering bits of shrapnel for you to build up and then launch. A casino level gives you a gadget that allows you to slow time in gel-like bursts, so you can platform by jumping off the suddenly slow-moving bodies of darts flinging their way towards a distant dart board, or you can dodge individual incoming hearts and diamonds sent your way by a floating deck of cards.

One level allows you to explore a recognisably domestic world but you can drastically change size, bashing through doorways one minute and wriggling through a gap in the skirting board a minute later. Another lets you transform into an ultra-heavy version of Samus Aran’s morph ball thingy, and has brilliant stuff for you to do once you have. These levels feel so Nintendo-like because they get everything out of their ideas. If you’re small but you can become big, can you blow stuff up from inside? 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. A whirl of bots to rescue, of loving Playstation references, of deep cuts like Ape Escape and more recent stars, who get outings I don’t really want to ruin. It’s boss fights when you expected them and boss fights when you absolutely didn’t. And while Astro Bot may not quite have Mario’s perfectly transmitted sense of weight, arriving through the screen and channelled through the pad and into the hands by sheer video game wizardry, they still have a lovely way of handling themselves, quick to dash, quick to stop, blessed with a spin attack and a hover move that allows you to finesse landings while still doing damage to anything beneath you – think FLUDD from Mario Sunshine.

It’s a riot of collectibles and hub world distractions, and it’s thought about your time, too, and how to make the best of it. Checkpointing is very generous, outside of the odd rogue boss battle, and when you’re playing through levels for the second time you can pay in-game coins for a companion character who will literally point out any bots or other doodads you missed on your first run. Or you can choose to go it alone. Some levels are vast and strangely beautiful – there’s a water park made of warm old stone that is one of the loveliest places I’ve been in a recent game – others are compact and happy to mix the rules up for a single moment of variation.

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’ve messed around with cool gadgets, used the controller in unusual ways, tilting it, yes, but also blowing into it, trying to read the buried hieroglyphs of its rumble, I’ve ticked boxes, collected things, unlocked things, nodded at references that make me feel old, or sharp-eyed, or generally in the know. But when I close my eyes I see the tumbling fruit, the hundreds and thousands, the gems stacked so high I can kick through them as if I’m wading through autumn leaves. I think, more than anything, of all the glorious bits and pieces.

Review code for Astro Bot was provided by Sony.