Astro Bot Review

I wanted to love this game and sing all kinds of heavy praises for it, the idea of a Playstation version of the Mario Galaxy games sounds awesome, I remember enjoying Astro Bot's Playroom, everyone in their mother was singing the hardcore praises it and I wanted to put this game on my favorites list since these past few weeks of new releases I have been really enjoying. Ultimately, while I can't say I dislike Astro Bot since I did at the very least get to the end of the game and finished it, the title turned out to be one of the most disappointing games I played in a long while. It's hard for me to get disappointed by a game nowadays but Astro Bot was a game that did it.

Before I start describing what I didn't like so much about the game, I'll describe what I liked. The stage designs and visuals do like very nice, crisp and colorful. This is pretty much the most Nintendo inspired Sony 1st party game you will ever play from the control gimmicks, to the minimal story, to the cutesy asethetic, to the "silent protagonist", and so on.

The stages much like Mario Galaxy do have a good amount of variety to them with a lot of gimmicks for the player to engage with like grabing hands, boxing gloves, a jump pack, a grapple hook and son on. There is also stuff like Mario's glide from Sunshine being one of the moves Astro can do, it's a little unreliable to use when using during long distance platforms but this isn't forced on you.

There's levels after bosses that are homages to Playstation franchises some being well known like God of War, Uncharted and Horizon to more "niche" stuff like Locoroco and Ape Escape. If you are the kind of guy that really likes Playstation then there is a lot to love about Astro Bot, I very much am, so I got a couple "that's cool" moments from the game even if they slowly start to become diminishing returns.

Now, the negatives and why I'm lukewarm on the game, and this might sound questionable considering the game has made it's name off it, but the Bot collecting. I already do not like it when platformers especially those that are stage based and don't have a seemless world with no load times but Astro Bot takes the Mario Galaxy 2 approach and have make the player actively secret hunt to get anywhere in the game. Sure, the Playstation fan service is cool and it is more interesting than most linear platformers that make you do mandatory secret hunting to unlock bosses but fact of the matter is, the devs of Astro Bot knows the game can be beaten in 5-6 hours so they pad out the game length by having the player search around for these bots in order to get furthur into the game. It says it took me 18 hours to beat the game but that is because much of my time was spent beating the level once, then looking up a guide and try to unlock all the bots in the level afterwards.

It doesn't even help that outside of locking off progress, the Bot Rescuing doesn't give you any special abilties when you collect a certain amount, the refrences I didn't care for anymore and I just wanted to hurry up move and get it over with. What even is the point of collectibles if they don't give you no tangible reward during gameplay? The whole thing just starts to feel like padding, at least Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy had a seemless world and an interesting movement system so the level gating collectibles felt tolerable but it's easy to see why the Jak sequels did away with that and the collectathon died out even if the execution of the Jak sequels could've been better.

The next issue I have and this is what made moment to moment gameplay in Astro Bot a pain in the ass for me is the hit point system. You can chock this up to a "skill issue" but the devs of Astro Bot has litered so many checkpoints in the levels that it feels like whenever I scrape by a combat encounter or a platforming section, it's because I got lucky and being babied than because I have the illusion of competence. Astro Bot has more level checkpoints than any platformer I have ever played.

A decent way to fix this to me, is to lower the amount of checkpoints but increase Astro's hit points to 3 outside of bosses. Mario had 3 HP in the Galaxy games and 2D Mario lets you find an additional hit point, same with the Ubi Art Raymans, Donkey Country Tropical Freeze and Crash Bandicot. You might have to change level flow but I argue a compromise can be made.

It also doesn't help that many enemy attacks can feel out of nowhere and cheap and no matter how hard I try like the Jab-Jab's spikes, I will randomly move around and try to kill them get hit, and respawn, maybe additional HP could make these enemies feel less annoying.

Overall, I wanted to really like Astro Bot and say it was an amazing game like many people have but instead, I can't help but feel like, "is that it?" It's by no means a terrible game, I wouldn't have gotten to the end of if I did but apart just wanted a game I consistently enjoyed rather than groan at every 25 mins