Today, PlayStation’s cinematic blockbuster titles still mostly cater to a mature audience, but Team Asobi is taking a different approach. The studio’s roster of delightful robots and the inventive gameplay with which they and players interact have been compared with the Nintendo way. But maybe the PlayStation didn’t need an answer to Nintendo and Sega’s beloved mascots. Games were entering an era in which more realistic human characters like Cloud Strife, Solid Snake and Lara Croft were becoming the new industry icons.

I consider myself a decent platforming player, but I know my limits on having perfect reaction timing. The mothership — a PS5, finally filling a role it’s always looked designed to play — crash lands on a desert world at the centre of several nearby galaxies. These systems house the game’s stages, where you’ll spend most of your time, but you’ll also regularly return to the hub world, which evolves and expands as you progress. It falls into a great rhythm of exploring each galaxy and its stages, then returning to the hub to drop off your robot buddies and discover new things to see and do.

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After completing a level, restart and you’ll spot a small birdhouse near the start of the level. Smash the glass casing on the birdhouse and pull the cord to get a bird companion who will point you towards any missed collectibles, including bots, puzzle pieces, and portals. It will cost a one-time fee of 200 coins per level, but it’s well worth it. Once you’ve paid the 200 coins, you can restart the level and summon the bird as many times as you want for free. In tandem with expert level design are the game’s diverse and exciting mechanics.

The game’s visuals aren’t necessarily pushing the PlayStation 5 but they’re flawless and silky smooth, with not a bug in sight. An American living in Germany, John has been gaming and collecting games since the late ’80s. John’s keen eye for and obsession with high frame-rates have earned him the nickname “The Human FRAPS” in some circles.

What Are All Special Bots In Astro Bot? Patapon Warrior – Tribal Warrior

Detailed in a PlayStation Blog post, Tick-Tock Shock is the first level available now. Subsequent stages — Thrust or Bust, Cock-A-Doodle-Doom, Hard to Bear, and Armored Hardcore — will be available each following Thursday at 6am Pacific / 9am Eastern / 2pm UK. The fact that Team Asobi’s games have the potential to become someone’s first game is something that Doucet takes seriously. “Team Asobi’s studio is just across the street from our building, so they were always the first to prototype with our hardware,” says Senior Principal Product Manager Toshi Aoki, product director for the DualSense controller.

Astro Bot is nothing short of a masterpiece, an ingenious platformer filled with vibrant worlds and ingenious design. It’s a game that oozes creativity, consistently delighting and surprising the player with new mechanics, gameplay twists, smart boss battles, and jaw-dropping set-piece moments. But past that, it’s also a grand celebration of PlayStation and video game history as a whole — the only game that’s been able to rival Super Smash Bros. in that regard.

Vibrant colors make me feel like I’m in a cartoon, but Team Asobi doesn’t flatten its environments or skimp on detail. In one level, I start by walking across swaths of bright green foliage. I feel the crunch of the grass between my metal feet and hear the sound from my DualSense’s speakers. Then I move on to a metallic checkerboard floor, where I hear my legs lightly click-clacking on the tiles.

The controller features a white and blue trim that perfectly matches the Dual Speeder in-game, as well as a smiling set of eyes on the touchpad. The game also crashed on me twice, both times erasing more progress than I’d have expected since I assumed it auto-saves after each level, but I’d lost about three or four levels of progress in both instances. However, I admit these crashes came at the end of my long 11-hour session with the game on my first day with it, so maybe it was an issue Team Asobi will address. Still, the hard crash backpedaling on my saved data was strange and somewhat soured what was a marathon of smiles for about 10 hours of that day.

He also offered a nod toward 30 years of PlayStation history, which formed the foundation of Astro Bot’s gameplay. https://g28.autos/ of five levels were added in July 2025, adding five new cameo bots including a couple of Final Fantasy characters. This is more of a nitpick, mainly because the game is actually catered to everyone.

It’s been quite a rough few weeks for Sony and PlayStation fans out there, and it’s great to know that it’s not all doom and gloom as Astro Bot is here to save the day. As a casual fan of platformers, Astro Bot blew me away and reminded me of the nostalgia and fun that is to be had with the genre. The last time to do this was Nintendo’s Super Mario Odyssey, which is a very high standard to beat or match in recent years. Needless to say, Astro Bot exceeded my expectations by being nearly perfect in almost every aspect of the game. As I collected them, I found myself getting surprisingly emotional as deep-cut games I grew up with got their lovingly crafted due. Every time I found an old friend, I was transported back to that kid in the backroom of my parent’s house playing PS1.