#9
This game was quite a surprise for me. I saw the announcement trailer and thought oh nice that’ll be a fun little game to play between the big releases. I didn't expect it to be my personal GOTY and actually end up winning GOTY at the Game Awards.
First off the music. I never thought I would be hearing music like this from a modern PlayStation title. This felt like I got transported back in time to the PS2 Era.
There are so many moments in this game that made me go “wow that’s clever”. The use of the Dualsense controller is really good. You can feel each footstep with the speaker and haptics. The way the devs managed to simulate moving through different environments is amazing. Moving through snow gives the controller a crunchy snow effect or moving through grass makes you feel every blade of grass. For the intro of each level you use the motion controls to steer the controller ship around obstacles and snag collectibles along the way, which i thought was a pretty neat feature. Plus you can’t fail these sections so the motion controls don’t feel intrusive or mandatory. The controller is used in many other ways like swinging on a bar, or shooting projectiles or tilting platforms, etc. Though this kind of highlights how underutilized the controller is in most PS5 games.
The game has plenty of cool power ups and gameplay mechanics that are used in fun ways. One gives you a slow time ability that you can use to avoid or jump on fast moving objects. Or another power that shrinks you to the size of a mouse and back again. Another transforms you into an iron ball that makes you impervious to damage as long as the button is held down. The game also has really fun physic interactions. One of the things i loved doing in game is just screwing around flinging various objects around such as piles of leaves or hundreds of apples. it's just pure joy. The main goal of the game is to rescue the bots lost in each level. Special bots are usually references to characters from various games. When you find one they return to the hub level; each one having a special interaction. The various references add to the fun of the game, some of them are playful jabs at other games or clever meta humor. Many of them gave me a good chuckle. The section leading to the final boss has got to be one of my favorite sequences in a game in recent memory. Just the final boss itself is lots of fun to fight.
There is so much to love about Astro Bot that I couldn't possibly list everything in this write-up. If you're a fan of platformers I can't recommend this game enough. I think Team Asobi is probably the most talented studio Sony has when it comes to game design and Astro bot is the best platformer to come out of any Sony studio.
Last edited by Eric2048 - 1 day ago
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