Despite having a rough couple of past months, Sony released a love letter to the more classical video games made in the PlayStation 2 era. It’s a throwback to games like “Crash Bandicoot,” “Spyro the Dragon” and other creative, fun games of that time. “Astro Bot” is the best AAA platformer to come out in years and one of the best non-Mario 3D platformers, if you can stand the non-stop barrage of brands.
“Astro Bot” barely has a story, but that’s not exactly a problem for a game genre dominated by stories of plumbers saving princesses.
In summary, a spaceship full of cute robots gets abducted and dismantled by a strange alien, scattering the robots across a multitude of worlds. It’s up to the player to find all of their adorable friends and put the ship back together, level by level.
It’s a bare-bones framing device to explore dozens of bespoke, beautifully crafted platforming levels filled with collectables and secrets.
The act of running and jumping through these levels is as smooth as warm butter, with feedback that makes you feel as though your controller is alive and a character in itself. It’s a shockingly involved experience that you can only really get in fun, tightly paced romps we see so few of from Sony nowadays.
This especially comes in with the variety in every level. In one, you swing your way through a tropical island full of pirates; in another, you carefully tread across giant construction sites with a rocket boost to get over tight spaces.
Boss fights are equally creative, the first one you encounter being a giant gorilla throwing Giant buildings and construction equipment to stop you in your tracks. You have to quickly run to the windows and other openings to avoid being knocked right off the square arena.
For real completionists, there are wildly challenging secret levels that require every bit of skill you have built up over the game and are a real nightmare for most. Sometimes, you can even find well-crafted homages to some classic PlayStation games, like a recreation of “Ape Escape” that’s used as a capstone for the end of the first zone.
But this as well brings up the elephant of the room: that “Astro Bot’s” many celebrations of Sony’s long history can cross the border into purely advertisement.
That’s not to say that it’s poorly made or lazy; far from it. Many of the bot costumes are themed around specific franchises or characters either owned by Sony or were deeply important to the legacy of the PlayStation series of consoles.
Characters from “Metal Gear Solid” share space with characters from “Uncharted,” “Ghosts of Tsushima,” “Yakuza,” “God of War,” and dozens of other brands associated with PlayStation. But the problem is that PlayStation’s overall brand identity feels like the only identity the game truly has.
“Crash Bandicoot” is a classic PlayStation platformer worth comparing “Astro Bot” to. Crash is… well, an anthropomorphic bandicoot with crazy facial expressions, a cool spinning jump and a loud and upbeat personality straight from the ‘90s.
That game is popular not just because it’s a well-designed platformer, but because Crash has a loud and interesting personality to go with it, which gives the game an identity.
“Astro Bot,” on the other hand, at times has the same feeling in identity as the Geico lizard or a celebrity promoting whatever brand you can think of in a commercial. It feels as though it exists solely to advertise a product, with personality as an afterthought.
This feels especially glaring at the end of a zone, where you repair your PlayStation 5-shaped spaceship by putting its different impressive mechanical pieces together like one would put together a PC, simulated with a quick motion control mini-game.
While fun and creatively visualized, it feels like nothing but the game trying to tell you that the PlayStation 5 is a cool, well-made console whose hardware should be analyzed and appreciated on every minute level. It feels heavy-handed as an advertisement but considering you need a PS5 to play the game in the first place, it feels wildly self indulgent.
Even the deeper-cut references within the game can feel a little hollow in the context of a brand celebration. You see dozens of franchises that PlayStation has not bothered to touch in what feels like decades next to the small handful of modern games that have been the only titles used to market their consoles.
“Astro Bot” is a fun game, one of the most fun platformers ever. But the constant barrage of branding as the sole personality feels difficult to ignore, especially in the climate Sony has put itself in.
