Fans of bits and pieces are going to absolutely love Astro Bot. It’s made of bits and pieces. Lots of these bits and pieces are nostalgia: you pick between old memory cards when choosing a save file, you’re rewarded at the end of a boss fight with a spell of Ape Escape monkey-netting fun. Look close at most surfaces and you’ll see some variation of the DualShock face buttons imprinted on it. Look in the sky and you might catch a passing reference to Fantavision.
All great. But what I really love about Astro Bot is that it’s also just filled with bits and pieces. Stuff to roll around in, stuff that forms little piles that can be kicked about. I’ll punch a tree and end up showered in falling fruit. I’ll open a chest and there will be lumps of gold rolling around at the bottom. In one completely dazzling level I was given a magnet, and soon I was vacuuming up metal bars by the dozen and spray cans by the hundreds, all ready to form a bait ball I could fling at a distant target. Another early level set me loose in a whipped cream winter wonderland and I spent five minutes just pacing through individual sprinkles the size of footballs, hundreds and thousands of hundreds and thousands scattered deep on the ground.
There are jokes about tech demo ducks in here, then, but there’s also the sense the whole thing is, on some level, a huge tech demo. I mean that in the best way. It’s a sustained tech demo, one that never runs out of new wonders to show you, new marvels to fling at you and swiftly discard. Previous Astro Bot games have been employed to showcase new bits of kit. This one’s different. It feels like Sony is trying to channel its whole spirit into this game. Astro Bot is a glimpse of what Sony wants you to understand that it believes that it is. It has the boundless cheer of a group of people coming together and trying to be their best selves.
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