Astro Bot Review: Finally, a Nintendo-level platformer on PlayStation

In the early stages of development Super Mario 64 —the game that catapulted Mario into 3D and in the process wrote the handbook for how characters should move through 3D video game worlds—Shigeru Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo focused heavily on how the character would feel while playing. Before they began designing levels, they had Mario run around an empty grid, then they continually iterated and refined the controls and moveset until Mario was inherently fun to control, even in the void. Only then did they begin to consider what he would actually do: what challenges he would face, what worlds he would inhabit, what adventures he would embark on.

In a sense, the Asobi team — Sony’s lead technology demo creator and creator Astro Playroom and upcoming AstroBot — has been doing this kind of groundwork for 12 years. From 2012 to 2020, the Tokyo-based team created small games, often distributed for free, aimed at demonstrating the interactive potential of Sony hardware. Playroom demonstrated the PlayStation Camera; VR Playroom AND Astro Bot Rescue Mission PlayStation VR headset; Astro Playroom DualSense controller for the PS5. The team had a knack for discovering delightful and satisfying interactions with the devices, and populated its games with adorable little robots that gained more and more personality with each successive release.

Now the Asobi team got a chance to use all their knowledge about fun AstroBota full-blown game that exists for its own purposes, not to serve Sony’s marketing agenda. And it’s as good as you’d imagine.

This does not mean that AstroBot — a lavishly produced, classic platformer starring robot mascot Asobi — eschews promotional duties or severs the ties between its unbridled protagonist and the hardware he inhabits. The game is saturated with PlayStation branding and fan service, almost to a fault.

Astro and his army of bot friends travel through space aboard a ship shaped like a giant PlayStation 5 console. After being attacked by a giant alien, the PS5 ship disintegrates, scattering the bots and components across neighboring galaxies and crashing on a desert planet (in a scene that seems to quote the beginning of Unexplored 3). Astro must jump from planet to planet aboard his controller-shaped Dual Speeder ship, rescuing robots and hunting down key PS5 components: SSD, memory, CPU, etc.

Many of the bots—173 of them, to be exact—are dressed up as PlayStation characters from the past and present. They’re digital collectible figurines, Funko Pop alternatives to 30 years of PlayStation games, commemorating just about every Sony game you can think of. Naturally, you’ll find Ratchet and Clank, Kratos, and Nathan Drake here; characters from other companies with PlayStation connections, like Metal Gear Solid’s Snake and Street Fighter’s Ryu and Ken, are also represented. Whether for licensing reasons or just to make for a fun guessing game, the bots have been given coy names like Dad of Boy (Kratos), Spinning Marsupial (Crash Bandicoot), and Immune Survivor (The last of us‘ Ellie.) There are a few deep cuts that will leave all but the most encyclopedic PlayStation fans scratching their heads. They gradually fill in the desert crash site, turning this hub world into a bustling Sony museum.

This onslaught of nostalgia bait and brand synergy initially seems somewhat less charming outside the context of a free add-on like Astro Playroom. Can’t Astro and Team Asobi afford to build their own identity? But in reality, they achieve just that, transforming that marketing flavor into something sincere, handmade, and celebratory.

Part of that is due to the clarity of many of the choices. Team Asobi is the last bastion of Japan Studio, Sony’s historically creative studio responsible for things like Iko, LocoRoco, Gravity Rush, PaRappa Rapperand many, many more unusual classics. Japan Studio was unfortunately disbanded in 2021, with many of its employees being transferred to Team Asobi to create AstroBot. Her wild characters and imaginative, innovative games are especially loved in AstroBotA catalog of PlayStation history.

That tribute is never more touching and joyful than in the case of Ape Escape. This Japan Studio series about a boy who catches naughty monkeys in his web is one of Sony’s many failed attempts to create a family game series that could compete with Nintendo, and like most of them, it met with little success. AstroBot is very much its successor, even in terms of hardware connection — the first Ape Escape was meant to be a showcase for the original analog DualShock controller. After defeating the final boss of the first galaxy in AstroBota level is unlocked that fully and faithfully recreates the anarchic chase style gameplay from Ape Escape AstroBot‘s world. It’s a wonderful touch; on one level, a nearly forgotten series comes back to wonderful life in a modern context, and Team Asobi pays homage to the memory of the endlessly inventive studio it once called home.

But AstroBot isn’t just an act of homage. There are more levels, like Ape Escape, in which Astro fully absorbs the personality and toolkit of another PlayStation hero and rampages through a level based on that character’s games. I won’t spoil them, but all of them achieve a surprisingly deep synthesis of their inspiration (often in a more mature game) with AstroBottactile world, charming characters, and mouthwatering gameplay. It’s a sign of this game’s confidence that its personality shines through so clearly through the costumes it dons.

This self-confidence comes partly from a rare kind of purism. AstroBot is a great, traditional, linear platformer that never aspires to be anything else, nor suffers from genre embarrassment. You run, jump, punch enemies, dodge hazards, collect coins, hunt for collectibles. Each level is a carefully crafted obstacle course of surprises, often topped by a novel, hilarious boss. Like most platformers, it offers the player little margin for error and gets pretty tough quickly, but the lives are infinite and the checkpoints are plentiful. (Kids will love it so much that they’ll persevere; mine did.) It’s exquisite in its simplicity, even when that sturdy old structure is enlivened by a few wonderfully inventive, transformative power-ups: jetpacks, spring-loaded boxing gloves, and gadgets that shrink Astro to a tiny mouse-bot or inflate him into a giant, bobbing sponge.

These pretty gadgets are crafted with the gift of touch—of creating a toy-like world that you feel you can reach out and touch, click, snap, squash, smash, crack, and squeeze—second only to Nintendo. Part of that comes from Team Asobi’s enthusiastic use of vibration, haptic triggers, and the DualSense speaker. (A lot of the game’s sounds come from the controller, which plays a big part in how immediate the action feels, while the TV speakers fire off the flawlessly upbeat beats of the excellent soundtrack.) Part of that touch is conveyed by the vivid animation. Part of it is rendered by Team Asobi’s astonishing, virtuoso control of the PlayStation 5 itself; AstroBot is a marvel of engineering, arguably the best-looking game on PlayStation 5 to date. The shine of surfaces, the slosh of fluids, the scale of levels, and the fluidity of frames are all stunning. The physics, as Astro causes piles of hundreds of shiny apples to fall or wades through a pool of golden nuggets, are simply showing off.

Thematically, Team Asobi appreciates the freedom of traditional platform games: it doesn’t have to stick to any one theme. AstroBotThe “s” levels are a restless procession of “what if (blank) but robots?” where the gaps are filled with turtle temples, weird trees, construction sites, or the inside of a giant worm. In the “Spooky Time” level, Astro freezes time to navigate a haunted house. In “Free Big Brother,” Astro unleashes Iron Giant-the size of a robot and climbs on its limbs. Everything is made of the same smooth, machined plastic and metal as a PlayStation device, even the rabbits, trees, and penguins; as in the Mushroom Kingdom, everything has eyes, but in this world they’re flashing blue LEDs. The robot theme adds a sweet logic to the rampant anthropomorphism, bloodless violence, and surreal non sequiturs of platform games. It’s like an arcade universe, a jumbled simulacrum of random concepts (and PlayStation games) assembled by some looping machine civilization.

Sony was aiming for something like this AstroBot since the PlayStation launched 30 years ago in the era of Mario and Sonic. In their quest to create a light family game that could both match Nintendo’s best and fit Sony’s cooler, tech-focused brand, they’d gone through mascots like Crash, Jak, and Sackboy. Sony ultimately settled on more adventurous cinematic action heroes, but deep in the consoles’ soul there was a feeling that something was missing. Astro Bot – dazzling, exhilarating game — it’s a celebration of all the missteps and bizarre detours Sony has taken in that pursuit. And it may well be the game that finally fills that gap.

AstroBot will be released on September 6 for PlayStation 5. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code provided by Sony. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commission on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find more information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.