At the latest PlayStation State of Play, Team Asobi announced their new title Astro Bot is coming to PS5 in just a few short months on September 6. As a major fan of its predecessor, the PS5 pack-in game Astro’s Playroom, I’m over the moon about the return of this adorable little robot.
The trailer shows that Astro Bot is going to be blowing up the scale of Astro’s Playroom and doubling down on everything that made it such a great game: charming characters, creative abilities, unique worlds, and a deep reverence for the PlayStation brand. Of course Astro himself is returning, but there’s also a suite of over 70 new enemies that we’ll encounter such as ones that are inspired by sumo wrestlers or bosses like the giant cobra that we see in the trailer. There’s also the adorable Barkster, which is a robot bulldog that also doubles as a new ability for Astro that allows him to air dash or speed into stronger enemies and objects to deal heavy damage.
Speaking of new abilities, Barkster is just one of over 15 that will be featured in Astro Bot. Another are the Twin-Frog Gloves that let you punch distant enemies, grapple onto things, or grab distant objects. The different abilities that were in Astro’s Playroom were a lot of fun to play with both a gameplay experience and a control experience thanks to the clever ways they took advantage of the DualSense’s features, so I’m very excited to see what new ideas Team Asobi brings to the table. This new adventure will take us across six galaxies and over 80 levels as we try to find the rest of Astro’s crew that we somehow got separated from. Deserts, volcanic areas, jungles, and casino inspired environments are just some of the locations that we’ll be visiting, but I can only imagine where else we’ll be going on this space-faring journey.
Astro Bot will also see the return of other robots that are dressed like classic PlayStation characters. Kratos, Parappa the Rapper, and Nathan Drake are some of the ones that the trailer spotlighted, and Team Asobi says that they doubled down on them this time around. They also teased a bigger role in the story for these characters, implying that they’ll be more than just fun cameos this time around. The trailer certainly hints at this as we see the Kratos lookalike tossing his axe to Astro, so it’ll be interesting to see who else is involved and the extent to which they are.
Astro’s Playroom is one of my favorite PS5 games, so I couldn’t be happier with the announcement of Astro Bot. It being a proper 3D-platformer and not a VR game like Astro Bot Rescue Mission might be a disappointment to fans of that game, but it’s ultimately for the best since it’ll allow the masses to experience and enjoy a fully-fledged platforming experience with Astro. I’m also excited by this announcement because of how different it is from the rest of the PlayStation Studios portfolio. While I enjoy their tentpole third-person, single-player, narrative-focused games, Astro Bot harkens back to a time when we got more light-hearted games from PlayStation. If it can live up to the potential of this footage and deliver even more of the inventiveness that I enjoyed from Astro’s Playroom, it’ll certainly be a strong contender for my Game of the Year.
TheComfySpot 