The sheer number of boss fights throughout Astro Bot is exciting, but each boss battle’s energetic song is what really brings their encounters to life. The music for the boss fights raises the thrill levels to the max, with guitar and violin strings joining together in beautiful chaos. Adrenaline pumps through the veins as players dodge attacks and find these bosses’ weak points, all to the tune of some of the best video game music heard in a long time.
Football Player – Pro Evolution Soccer
For example, the Joel Bot from The Last of Us is said to have a habit of “[telling] the occasional white lie,” in reference to his highly questionable personal choices. Little nods like that will make any longtime gaming fan smile. Astro Bot follows the tiny but brave Astro as his PS5 mothership is attacked by his galactic nemesis, scattering the crew throughout space. Only Astro can set things right, and he needs your help to rescue the stranded crew and rebuild the mothership on his biggest mission yet. Michael writes about video games at PlayStation Lifestyle and ComingSoon. Apart from gaming, he likes to skate, play drums, and watch the Chicago Bulls lose.
Astro Bot Makes Great Use Of The Dualsense Controller
Team Asobi outdoes itself in many ways with Winter Wonder, a level that acts as the perfect Christmas playground and, perhaps, a blueprint for more explorative, open-ended design in Astro’s future. Regular enemies are wearing reindeer antlers, and many animal bots are bobbing along to the music and enjoying the festivities. It’s so cheery and fun, even more so than is typical for Astro Bot, and it’s the perfect Christmas playground to mess around in and absorb its joyful atmosphere. Looking for something festive to play on PS5 to keep the holiday vibes rolling? In our view, there’s nothing better than Astro Bot’s post-game Christmas level.
The fact is that the game is both easy to learn and play, yet it’s able to be entertaining with the sheer amount of things to collect and discover. While exploring a certain level in the first world, I came across a portal of sorts that actually led me to unlock a few of the game’s secret levels. This made me wonder just how many levels there actually are in the game. The amount of collectibles and secrets there are to discover is also staggering; it’s enough to keep you playing for hours on end and keeps achievement hunters busy. Lastly, the game even has a ton of gameplay callbacks to their older IPs which pulls the nostalgia strings perfectly.
What could have been a 30-second moment turned into a 20-minute one as I gleefully interacted with every detail I could, just as a kid might. Outside of bosses and minibosses, there initially doesn’t appear to be a great range in enemy types. Sure, some are coated in different colours of paint or dressed to fit in with their surroundings, but they are all vanquished via the same few fundamental jump and hit combos. Later on, though, the design book opens up and introduces some of my favourite foes. These include an anthropomorphic playing card that flings a hand of clubs and spades your way, which you can then jump on to make your way towards the enemy to deal a killing blow of your own.
As Astro, the player embarks on a quest to save lost robots, retrieve parts for the PlayStation 5 mothership, and defeat the alien Space Bully Nebulax. Much like the previous title Astro’s Playroom, Astro Bot uses DualSense controller features including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. From one level to the next, gamers may go from flipping the very terrain they are walking upon with the changing of the time of day to hopping across a platforming gauntlet set to the beat of a drum. Those are only just two examples in what feels like an endless barrel of level design ingenuity. 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.
It adds so much to the in-game experience that this game might actually be the perfect demo to showcase what a PS5 and DualSense can do. The use of adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, and gyro controls makes the game perfect for the console. That was followed up with the PSVR-exclusive game Astro Bot Rescue Mission. And then everyone who buys a PS5 gets a free digital copy of Astro’s Playroom, a short game that lasts between three and five hours, depending on how many of the collectibles you want to get. Platformers have so long followed in the footsteps of Mario, with so many titles trying to emulate what the mustachioed plumber has achieved.
Some of the more memorable levels stem from popular Sony franchises like God of War, with Astro wielding Kratos’ ax on one planet. OK365 mined Sony’s vaults, far beyond simple Crash Bandicoot callbacks, and into weird and wonderful games like LocoRoco and Vib-Ribbon. 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. However, I admit these crashes came at the end of my long 11-hour session with the game on my first day with it, so maybe it was an issue Team Asobi will address. Still, the hard crash backpedaling on my saved data was strange and somewhat soured what was a marathon of smiles for about 10 hours of that day. Normally, these levels are as brief as 30 seconds, but they require perfection and give the game a taste of trial-and-error it otherwise consciously rejects.
This extends to the level’s unique Bots, which are all God of War characters with additional quirks and inside jokes that fans will get. It seems odd to say I don’t want to spoil a game that effectively has no story, but some of the game’s best secrets really must be discovered with your own eyes. These special levels arrive toward the end of each galaxy’s main mission path and bestow to you a bundle of themed bots as well as yet another cool new mechanic not to be seen ever again in the game. Its soundtrack–already an array of bubbly earworms–reimagines familiar overtures from other games.
Some of the cameo bots even have a direct impact on Astro Bot’s gameplay. Each galaxy concludes with a special level themed after a PlayStation game, with Astro taking on the abilities of the hero from that game. For example, there is a God of War level in Astro Bot where Astro gets his hands on the Leviathan Axe. The axe functions similarly to how it does in the actual God of War games, meaning Astro can use it as both a weapon and as a tool to freeze objects for puzzle-solving purposes. I won’t mention any of the other games that are given this kind of treatment in Astro Bot as part of the fun is getting to the end of the galaxy and seeing what’s next, but trust that each one of these stages is incredible.