It’s a thrilling adventure that takes you on a journey through different planets, filled with exciting challenges and unique abilities. It even pays homage to some situs hk pools of PlayStation’s most beloved characters, bringing back a sense of nostalgia and joy for both new and seasoned players. A collection of endlessly inventive levels and fantastically fun abilities, it delivers joy in spades, never once becoming even remotely dull or repetitive. And while you don’t need a long history with Sony systems to enjoy it, it is especially a delight for those with a piece of PlayStation in their heart as a treasure trove full of playable nostalgia awaits.

The game’s popularity has continued well into this year, after becoming one of the surprise hits of 2024. Not only has Astro Bot claimed a bunch of industry awards and game of the year titles, but it continues to keep players coming back with new DLC levels as well. While more of an extension of its previous titles than something all-new, it sounds like Team Asobi has cooked another stellar game. With over 80 stages and more than 15 power ups, players that wanted more of Astro’s Playroom will unlikely be dissatisfied.

According to Jamie Smith, Team Asobi’s Principle Animation Director, the animations of Astro and other characters in the game have been drastically increased. These additions enrich the gameplay while further establishing Astro as a character. Seeing Astro take out and play his PS One or being frightened to death in a horror-themed stage adds to his charm in classic mascot character fashion.

In tandem with expert level design are the game’s diverse and exciting mechanics. At the start of nearly every level, Astro jumps into a suit or straps on a backpack of some kind that gives them a new ability. In one level, it’s spring-powered boxing gloves resembling cartoon frogs.

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As Astro, you’ll strap on the ability and intuitively understand it. Stranded in space following an attack from a googly-eyed alien, Astro’s mission is to repair their ship and rescue all 300 pals scattered across five main clusters of planets, each composed of individual levels. Naturally, the story is not the focus here, and yet I was so immersed in the 15-hour game that I beat it in two long sittings. It may be 2024’s most immersive game, and it achieves that without a line of dialogue.

When Microsoft entered the industry with the Xbox in 2001, Halo’s Master Chief instantly shaped the console’s image. Microsoft’s purchase of Rare, a studio that had created platformers with mascot-like characters for Nintendo, almost seemed like an afterthought. While today PlayStation’s headquarters may be located in San Mateo, California, the history of Sony’s beloved video game console brand started in the early 1990s in Tokyo, Japan. Ken Kutaragi – who would later become known as the father of PlayStation – had been working together with Nintendo on a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Nintendo.

In Let it Slide, you will slip, slide and skate your way across a frozen sea avoiding the perilous icy waters below. Jump across crumbling icebergs, dodge spinning blades, and create your own frosty platforms on the way to rescue your freezing friends. In Building Speed, with the help of Barkster, the bulldog booster, you will blast your way through a sky-high city. Dodge cranes, smash through crates, and even speed through a flying car wash on the way to rescue your stranded crew. The crew mourns Astro and sad credits begin to roll, but are interrupted by a broken Astro falling back onto the mothership.

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. They look smooth and flow well, and it’s worthy to note that the bots’ special animations representing their respective characters also add so much to the character representation in the game. Moving on to the audio design of the game, everything from its music, sound effects, and what not is superb. They fit in perfectly with the game’s vibe and atmosphere, which is really hard to find a fault as it even uses the DualSense speakers impeccably.

This means that after the thrill of the game’s nostalgic moments wears off, there is not much reason to play after its 15 hours are up. Astro Bot levels challenge players to collect all the stranded bots, but there are other things players will want to keep an eye out for as well, like coins and puzzle pieces. Everything players collect goes to Astro Bot’s hub world, the Crash Site. Here, hundreds of rescued bots congregate and can be used within the hub to rescue even more bots.

Over 150 of them in fact, as characters from PlayStation’s vast library of games have made their way into Astro’s world in the form of other bots. There are the ones you’d expect like Lombaxes, tomb raiders, and a certain rapping dog but, delightfully, some are plucked from the more obscure end of the scale. It’s light touches of irony and slapstick humour like this that keep Astro’s playful tone going throughout. It really is just a delight from start to finish in this regard. Even powers from previous Astro adventures are reinvented to great effect. For example, the Monkey Climber is an evolution of Playroom’s climbing ability, but the assistance of a small robotic ape with huge hands this time means rocks can be hurled and ground pounded to great delight.

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This is joined by a PlayStation 5 Pro patch, which allows the best resolution while running at 60 frames per second. Team Asobi has teased that tools will eventually be added to Astro Bot that should appeal to speedrunners. With that tool and a bit of post-launch content updates, Astro Bot’s fun could last a lot longer than it does, and that would be a welcome inclusion for a game with a short run time. Still, any frustration with the game ultimately stems from wanting more of what Astro Bot provides, which at its core is a top-tier platformer with innovation, charm, and enjoyment to spare. The game also crashed on me twice, both times erasing more progress than I’d have expected since I assumed it auto-saves after each level, but I’d lost about three or four levels of progress in both instances.

There are 91 stages in Astro Bot, making this one of Team Asobi’s biggest and most ambitious games to date. Between them, they boast well over 460 collectibles, including 120 Puzzle Pieces, 10 Lost Galaxy Warps, and 332 stranded Bots that are just waiting to be rescued. I expected it to be a pretty fun little cartoon romp where the main draw would be pointing at the screen and going “Look! It’s Nathan Drake!”. What I got was one of the greatest platformers I have ever played, in terms of creativity, consistency, and cleverness, that just so happens to have a bunch of PlayStation mascots inside it.

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The most refreshing thing about the PlayStation Bots is that they’re not used as often as one would expect. It could have been easy for Team Asobi to overdo the callbacks and make this game nothing more than a self-indulgent reference fest. Instead, they treated these cameos and references like a spice that was only occasionally sprinkeld throughout the game. The game puts a lot of this “spice,” but understands that too much will kill the dish.