by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
Astro Bot is a wonderful adventure and an unapologetic explosion of simple, but beautifully rendered, gaming pleasure …
The humble PlayStation has been with us since 1994, if you can believe it. Sony’s beloved console continues to be a fixture in loungerooms across the world, delivering world class first party titles and a bunch of excellent third party games as well. You know what it hasn’t been prioritising much lately, though? Joy.
While games like God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Horizon and Bloodborne are all varying degrees of excellent, they’re also pretty bloody serious. Sure, Ratchet and Clank provided colourful fun, but it feels like a drop in the ocean compared to the tsunami of grimness that the long-lived console so often provides. Enter Astro Bot, sequel to the free-with-your-PS5 tech demo, Astro’s Playroom, and it’s an injection of pure joy right into your veins.
Astro Bot puts you into the adorable shoes of, well, Astro Bot, an endearing wee robot who is piloting his PS5-shaped mothership through space, with a bunch of bot friends hanging out and having a good time. Mild tragedy strikes when the blobby green space bully Nebulax attacks, stealing the mothership’s CPU, scattering the bots and causing Astro to crashland on a nearby planet. The scrappy little doer now has to reassemble his ship, find his crew and generally get into a series of enchanting adventures in imaginative levels with jaw-dropping visual fidelity.
Expect to say “awww” and “how cute” a lot.
Aside from the excellent presentation, the wealth of imagination here is impressive. Ol’ mate Astro gets temporary powers in levels, like a chicken that acts as a jetpack, a bulldog who allows you to smash through walls, frog gloves that mean you can punch on with the best of them and (a personal favourite) a gadget that allows you to shrink down to the size of a mouse and navigate the world from a super small perspective. Each of these abilities, and others, give the player such a sense of discovery and delight that you’ll often stop and shake your head in wonderment. It’s all just so clever and utterly disarming that even coming from the gore-spattered battlefields of Space Marine 2, your humble world janitor was completely won over.
You’ll probably knock over the main story of Astro Bot in about ten hours, with another 5-6 hours of bonus objectives to round out the package. If you have ruggies, this is an obvious buy as this thing will keep the little tackers busy for yonks. But even childless adults will rediscover a sense of joy and whimsy that’s usually missing in PlayStation first party titles. Put simply, Astro Bot is a wonderful adventure and an unapologetic explosion of simple, but beautifully rendered, gaming pleasure. If you own a PS5, and possess a soul, you should get your hands on this giddy charmer.
