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Astro Bot – Technical Review

A Romantic Retro Platforming Hero

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History Was the Future

Gaming’s early years were constantly filled with originality, fun and new experiences almost every week. 50 years or so later, reinventing, surprising and originality has become all but impossible. Team Asobi never played by the rules and with their 4th Astro Bot title, their Second PS5 exclusive, they break almost all with a flamboyant, fun, ingenious, unique, 90s style platformer that could have come from the PlayStation and Saturn era.  A technically refreshing and passionate game that soars sky high on the Dual Sense and PS5.

Gameplay

 As a game concept and play style, this is business as usual from prior games and those referenced 32 and 64-bit platformers. Think of it more as the third in the trilogy of Astro bot rescue mission and Astro’s playroom. Astro’s ship (which is a PS5 tall boy edition) is hijacked by the same alien fiend, whipping out the innards in the CPU, Memory, GPU and leaving you marooned on a desert planet. Here you kick of a satellite to scan the galaxy and then enter each themed world, work through 4+ zones before a boss battle to progress to the next world, with a surprise or 30 in-between which I won’t spoil. Suffice to say this leans in heavy on the PlayStation Family and its 30-year heritage with unmitigated success. You would have to be a cold or simply younger gamer to not have a warm glow throughout your play with the nods, winks and more used to tickle the nostalgia bone, Yet they never make it feel overdone, tacky and they use sound, animation, set-pieces and more to overwhelm you often with such a clear love for all things gaming, and this of course includes the mighty Nintendo.

Each world offers up unique challenges and often skills that are required to traverse, defeat and overcome your enemies and even environment. The aim is to rescue your robot pals hidden around the level. While bashing, zapping or otherwise removing the assortment of spiky goombahs to jelly monsters, giant monkey island pirates and a menagerie of enemies focused on making you fail. The main hook is the method and means of progressing the world using the skills and equipment provided, all OSP, within the cunning design, secrets areas and hidden routes & perks dotted around, amongst and within each grassy hill, gooey rock or armoured clam. The game still retains the same feel and style of the others, specifically the VR rescue mission with its scale and scope. As a reference it works similar to Super Mario Galaxy both in the segments and dynamic world design and its use of the input device. The viewpoint often changes and shift from within a level, A Clockwork Knight like pseudo 3D, miniature BUG moments as you mouse around shifting size bringing a whole new perspective on the task at hand or a high octane set-piece that feels uncharted in the platforming space.

Graphics, Physics and Technology

 Although at first glance the game may appear and be quoted as simple, this belies the passion, skill and ingenuity going on here. As per the PS5 Pack in title, the art style is clean, sharp and physically based. Objects have a clear cartoon, hyper stylish but realistic look and feel that mirrors much of what Nintendo has done since the Wii onwards days. But the quality and technology are far more impressive here and surprisingly can push the PS5 quite hard at times. A single mode is offered which targets 60fps, resolutions are never an issue, but the Asobi engine has run a dynamic scaler since at least the PSVR titles and here we see it scale from a full 3840×2160 down to a counted low of 2560×1440. This is not a game that ever suffers from bad image quality or break up due to its art style being bright, vertex focused shading, physically based pixel lighting and clean lines and excellent use of geometry, normal maps, textures and details that reduce both in and in surface artifacts under movement. Most of the time the only thing you notice is some stair step edges on high contrast objects, but even then, you have to be looking for them.

World designs, scale and density are the most impressive yet. Many have a Sonic Adventure feel and even some SEGA inspired music within. This pirate cove level is a particular early standout that swoops you in across the undulating ocean, dolphins playing ahead as you land on your own desert. Later as you work your way up the island you can admire the vistas from on high as the island bustles and sways below, sun refracts across the ocean. Excellent use of high-quality sprite-based Bokeh Depth of Field as scale and presence to gameplay, the moments where you shrink down and others where you grow are impressive and effective in just how big, or is that small, things are. The game uses Shadow maps with a high-quality filter and although they appear to not use any cascades this helps the image as you never get the blend between them which can be distracting and adds to the solid and magical world you are plonked inside. Lighting both direct and indirect is superb with the game often used dynamic point and spotlights within each level, explosions, weapons, enemies and more shine light and shadows as you play. Sun bounces off sand and bathes objects with a soft GI, caustics bounce onto the underside of piers or inside caves. Due to the fixed lighting and levels many of these can be fixed, baked and more but the results are non the less impressive and alongside the excellent PBR materials, art and clean stye leaves you immersed at every nook and cranny.

 Animation and physics are a huge reason it looks, play and feels so good all the time. Each world, enemy, bot and even rock comes alive as you move throughout. From the staple of any 90s platformer, idle animation are cute, smooth and emotive, enemies have physical tells letting you know when they will attack like a Hanna Barbara cartoon. Weight and physicality is portrayed as you hit and enemy, bounce on something, swing on a vine and much more that feels like a kid playing with their toy figures in the garden or bath time. Physics and the sheer physicality of everything here is the standout and can sometimes be the cause of some dips in performance, although brief. Paying homage to the famous rubber duck demo from ex Argonaut programmer and founder of Q-games Dylan Cuthbert, we so objects have buoyancy as they bob and swim, glass breaks procedurally, water and fluids are used in abundance. Thousand of instanced objects can tumble from the trees and roll and interact. Leaves bob with water surface and can be whipped up by your spin just to settle down again. Jelly is pushed into, grabbed hold off, spun round and water, honey and other fluids are often used to progress, break down or through. Each world as a fully believable physics model applied that feels so old school and like a tech demo at times, as many old 16 and 32-bit games used to. Showing off your skills and coding talent is great when it is so much fun and really strengthens something I have harped on about for years, to have a bigger push on the physics models in games no over just graphics is where teams should focus, Astro bot does just that, and although limited, constrained within the gameplay loop and aims still offers a genuine sandbox with which to play, destroy and create as part of or in supplement to the game play. It is the biggest technical achievement here aside the brilliant use of light, distortion and motion that gives everything a reality based physics model that is very rare in current games, you could blow me down with a feather.

You can Feel the passion

 The Dual Sense is a key element to how all this works, sound is used to perfection with only direct sounds from your bot making vibrations and noise from the controller. Juggling bananas created a thud and vibe each side during the idle animation, or rain hitting your little helmet umbrella as you swipe and spin. Climbing walls with large gloves requires a tilt of the Dual Sense left and right as you use the adaptive triggers to grab each ledge with left and right. Catching bots, zooming in, boosting into levels and using the assortment of skills you are granted from each level as you pop open a chest. From a rocket powered chicken, extendable fists and even VR powered bullet time each punch through a wall, crack of an egg, electrified death or splash into the ocean is as much felt as seen and heard and it really cements how integral the game design has been to best incorporate but not frustrate you with its fundamental integration into everything you do. It achieves an unprecedented impact that would feel significantly reduced were it not using the Dual Sense.

Sound

 Sound is another key ingredient within this superlative adventure, from the classic and retro fuelled tunes that already feel part of the furniture. The astro bot tune, Ninja 80s 8-bit style beats, classic PlayStation tunes given an Astro vibe and grand moments within the boss battles. The music is vital within the impact the game has and used to perfection to great mood and even suspense when all goes silent.

 Sound effects, mixing and processing are equally as accomplished, with each enemy sound, strike and squeal being unique and identifiable. Reverberation within caves gives an old-school Super Mario World SNES vibe, as does the haunted, ghosts n goblins style levels. Ground makes different sounds as you walk, run and smash through, You can hear the sounds of the bots calling for help as you draw by, and the sound origin can be tracked to their location. It as just as much effort, thought and passion within it as every aspect of the game and feels as polished, integral and intrinsic within the games appeal and impact that without it would not be the same. All of these combine within the Dual Sense to create a showcase of a game that is as much a celebration of gaming and PlayStation past and legacy as it is a perfect example of how much more can be achieved within the medium, so good you can feel it.

Performance is excellent throughout, but a few sections can see some heavier dips, not shown here for spoilers, but these are largely when physics, destruction’s and streaming get heavy. Most sections play out as you see here, a locked and smooth 60fps and I never had any issues that came up on my eyeball analysis graph either.

Summary

 As all their previous games, it is packed with a warmth that has seemed lost in games of late, and captures the old 80s and 90s feel to perfection. The 90s gaming period was an eclectic mix, filled with attitude, fun, style, colour, speed, originality, music and most enduring, shifted the medium out of 2D and into the 3D worlds we still enjoy today. One of the leading genres in that stride was platformers, from semi 3D hybrids like Bugs to cuter and colourful fire breathers with Spyro. From Rare, Insomniac, SEGA, naughty dog and Nintendo It was a revelatory time in the platforming world that delivered again and again, before running out of steam and new ideas, aside Nintendo. Yet, many decades later, I would have never thought any team could reinvigorate and reinvent with such creativity again. Asobi did that with one of, it not, the best PSVR games still, and as a free pack in for the PS5 dual sense. This PS5 sequel brings all the charm, wonder and individuality and then some of that ere and previous games. Sure, it is not a drastic shift from those games, and it reuses many aspects of the previous games, but still has so much more to offer both in gameplay, secrets galore and a wealth of things to try and find and even after 12+ hours of play I still have more secret levels, characters and more to find and achieve. I can see it being on many Game of the year lists, and is is most certainly found a place on mine.