Astro Bot: The Review
Score: 10 out of 10
Note: A free DLC expansion "Stellar Speedway" is releasing weekly from October 17th to November 14th and as such, we will be releasing a mini-review of the DLC on November 15th.
The Positives
- Astro Bot shines in using every aspect of the PlayStation 5 to its advantage with fun usages during abilities, boss fights and even in the world map;
- The diversity in every level is also a standout with 80 different levels, each with a new setting to explore like an haunted mansion, a volcano and even letting us adventure into the worlds of Uncharted, Horizon and God of War;
- The easter eggs to PlayStation franchises in the form of collectible bots are some of the best collectibles ever put into a videogame. There's over 150 different bots to discover so if you think of any PlayStation franchise, it's very likely that you'll be able to find it inside of Astro Bot;
- While talking about the different levels and different collectible bots, we have to mention something in better detail: the couple missions dedicated to some of PlayStation's most known franchises (Ape Escape, Uncharted, God of War, LocoRoco and Horizon). They are complete standouts, even if we think some famous franchises could have also been given the same treatment, and playing with Aloy's Bow, Kratos' Axe or Nathan Drake's gun made some very good changes of pace to the already stellar gameplay from normal levels;
- We also have to mention the Hub World, where when can encounter every bot we save throughout the game and interact with them as they are grouped together by franchise, which makes it easier to identify where they are;
- Customization is also pretty remarkable as we get the ability to not only customize our DuelSense (with several different colors and styles) but also our playable Astro, that can get dressed as Ratchet, Jak, the Hunter from Bloodborne, PaRappa and many more);
- Astro Bot's gameplay shines as a fun (but sometimes challenging) platformer that rivals even some of Mario's best games;
- The soundtrack is one of the standouts of the entire game with every track giving their respective level a life of its own. The song heard during the opening menu is definitely going to be remembered for decades as one of the most iconic PlayStation songs to date;
- In terms of performance, we have zero complaints to say about Astro Bot. Throughout our 20 hour save in which we 100% the game, we didn't encounter a single bug (except the ones meant to be in the game) or any technical failure.
The Negatives
- Astro Bot's runtime is, as most games as of late, a bit short with average 100% completion going from 10 to 20 hours;
- Outside of boss fights, Astro is only given a "one-hit death", which means that any mistake could cost you. However, most of the times your progress isn't pushed to far back but in some cases, especially the longer (and harder) challenge levels, that "one-hit death" really comes back to bite you if you aren't careful;
- When you discover a portal to a secret level inside a regular stage, the game automatically sends you out of that regular stage and brings you back up to the World Map, something that gets quite annoying when those portals are hidden near the end of a level because they make you replay the level all over again to get back up to that point.
The Bugs and Issues
- In this category, we can only talk about one small thing that happened during our entire playthrough, something that might not even be related to the game itself, but in one of our sessions, after we finished playing and turned off our PS5, the game didn't auto-save a pretty considerable chunk of our progress from that latest session (about 1 or 2 hours worth of progress). We aren't sure if this was a problem with the game itself, the console or some outside factor but we felt it was worthy of being mentioned in this category as it affected our experience.
Check out the DLC Review here: Stellar Speedway Review
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