Astro Bot – Galaxy Calls Video Game Review

While I’m not the kind of platformer fan who seeks them out outright, I have to admit that throughout gaming history, it’s the genre that has defined video games and their generations. From Mario or Sonic, through Crash Bandicoot or Rayman, to Ori or Hollow Knight. Every great platformer has something incredibly appealing, easy to learn, and addictive that’s hard to put down. All of these memories of gaming history and what makes video games video games came flooding back to me while playing Astro Bot. In 2020, I wrote about Astro’s Playroom as “the best way to spend your first few moments with the PS5,” and criticized the game for one thing: its brevity. That’s exactly what the new game has fixed, and the work is almost perfect.

• Platform: PS5
• Release date: 09.06.2024
• Manufacturer: Team Asobi (Japan)
• Genre: platform game
• Czech localization: yes (lyrics)
• Multiplayer: No
• Data for download: 37 GB
• Play time: 15+ hours
• Price: 1699 crowns (Alsa)

A galaxy full of ideas

Astro Bot wastes no time in throwing you into the game almost immediately. The game’s plot is hardly a story, consisting of short, wordless cutscenes about how your spaceship, in the form of an animated PlayStation 5, is attacked by an evil green alien (which bears a striking resemblance to Alza’s mascot) and key components are stolen. from it. The crash then scatters hundreds of Astrobots across the galaxy, and you must travel across 50+ planets (levels) trying to find and rescue all the Astrobots. All sorts of enemy minions, from regular ones to massive bosses with majestic, dynamic arenas, will prevent you from doing so.

More than 50 planets await you.

Traveling to a single planet can take anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, depending on whether you simply run ahead or carefully explore every nook and cranny. You’ll need to find enough astrobots to unlock more advanced parts of the game, so you have a good reason to seek them all out. A cool (but optional) mechanic will give you a bird companion when you repeatedly visit the same planet to warn you and point out things you’ve missed, so you can avoid getting completely lost, though you’ll have to use some ingenuity here and there to figure out how to get to a certain place.

astrobot006 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot001 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot003 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot007 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot005 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot004 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

astrobot002 | Source: Martin Zavřel / Zing.cz

One of the best things about the game is its variety. Almost every planet has its own personality, alternating all sorts of biomes and genres: from desert to sea, from tropical getaway to haunted castle. In addition, some planets also have additional gameplay mechanics, in which you are provided with unique accessories and abilities, from a rocket backpack to a magnet or a light bulb that reveals invisible platforms. Variety and imagination are the best features of the game, so you will find it difficult to tear yourself away from it: you will always want to see what is happening on the next planet, and once you get there, you will have so much fun that you will not be able to stop until you reach the end. And then you will want to see what will happen on the next, next planet.

Perfect fusion

A very important part of the game’s charm is how stunning it looks and sounds. Although at first glance everything is a simplified caricature of animated toys, the material and surface of individual objects and the environment seem almost tangibly realistic, including all sorts of reflections, dynamic lighting or physical reactions of objects to each other. Very often, the game really enjoys allowing you to traverse a certain area or turn hundreds of small objects in your path, or dynamically change the entire environment around you in real time. So far, I have only seen one video game that looked comparatively “tangible” graphically, and that was Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. And everything loads absolutely lightning fast, so you usually don’t even notice the recording. Of course, the game runs in 4K resolution and 60 frames per second.

Much of the game’s charm is how amazing it looks and sounds.

In terms of sound, the game worlds and their inhabitants come alive with irresistibly charming sounds of all kinds, accompanied by pleasant electronic melodies adapted to the place. Importantly, the sound comes from the TV and the DualSense controller at the same time, which, combined with the very careful use of haptic feedback, helps to further immerse you in the game. The controls and the gameplay itself feel extremely polished, and moving around this world and interacting with it in all possible ways is a joy. I will not specifically mention other specific cases, because many of them are a big surprise. But few game worlds literally come alive with their mechanics and transformations like this one.

At the same time, fans of the PlayStation brand and history will get an extra boost of joy and motivation. More than half of the astrobots are characters from famous PlayStation video games, from the most famous (Kratos, Nathan Drake) to lesser-known characters from the first generation of PlayStation games. Some characters have entire planets, including central mechanics or accompanying music created in accordance with their specific games. Collecting these cute variations and memories is a pleasure, which is what your “home planet” is for, where you return between individual expeditions and gradually repair your PS5 ship here, attracting more and more rescued assistants. As everywhere in the game, all sorts of surprises are hidden here, including unlocking additional mechanics that enrich the game. Everything is so perfectly connected that it is difficult to give up the game without finding and implementing everything the game has to offer.