Everything from running, jumping, bashing, and using Astro Bot’s boot thrusters to clear a gap feels incredible. The precise movements the little bot makes is fine-tuned to perfection. The controller’s haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are showcased in ways that show the relationship that Team Asobi has with the Dual Sense design team. The tiny vibrations when he runs, the way different objects cause the controller to rumble is immaculate and feels genuinely different to each obstacle. Tilting the controller to navigate your ship or hammer in nails, to the adaptive triggers and their use for a variety of his abilities is second to none. Where this becomes frustrating is that it shows how many teams, Sony’s included, are flat-out ignoring this tech, making Astro Bot yet again feel like a tech demo for controller features that have been out for four years now.

After beating Chief Cawah in the Dude Raiding, you will recover the Mothership’s GPU. To collect the Mothership’s SSD in Astro Bot, you need to complete all main world levels in the Tentacle System. After beating Nidhog in the Bot of War world, you will recover the Mothership’s SSD.

And now that it has gone on to become one of the best-selling PS5 games, there are likely plenty more adventures on the way. Astro Bot is rolling back the years, not only shining a light on 30 years of PlayStation history through a ton of cameos and level design tributes, but by putting platformers back at gaming’s pinnacle. A fantastically colourful and creative romp through a huge variety of settings, it’ll have your thumbsticks clicking, your heart racing, and even your lips blowing – yep, that’s a mechanic in the game.

Playstation Dualsense Controller (astro Bot Joyful Limited Edition)

It doesn’t have trouble keeping its double dips to a minimum, though. Whether I’m platforming up a singing tree’s branches, freeing a giant robot from its restraints, or busting through glass walls with my bulldog jetpack, I feel like I’m always discovering something new in almost every level. That’s why Astro Bot feels as consequential as it does even if it just looks like your average 3D platformer full of collectibles and clever power-ups at a glance. The expertly designed PS5 exclusive plays like an intervention with its own publisher. It brings the PlayStation platform on an intergalactic journey through its history to rediscover its long lost sense of wonder. It’s not just a very effective ad for Sony; it’s an exuberant adventure that remembers that there’s power in play.

Astro Bot is quite literally this year’s best game yet, and it being a single-player platformer makes it all the more special. It checks all the boxes of being a complete package with its visuals, story, value, audio design, and most importantly, gameplay. The game is worth every dollar that it costs, and everyone that owns a PS5 should look to try this game out.

Let’s get the traditional Digital Foundry bullet point specs out of the way. Astro Bot uses dynamic resolution scaling and I noticed a 1440p to 2160p rendering window (though of course, this could change according to content). Thanks to its simple, clean design and effective anti-aliasing, the game’s image quality is really never an issue and it holds up well without any ghosting reconstruction or other image stability issues. It presents very cleanly, which is so important for legibility in a platform game – and Team Asobi got it right. The irony that Astro Bot is launching on the same day that Concord is being shut down will not be lost on anyone, even though that is essentially a coincidence. But in actuality Astro Bot isn’t a very good celebration of PlayStation’s history. [newline]It is, however, one of the best 3D platformers ever made and an absolute joy from beginning to end.

And in case you’re wondering if it’s any good, you can put those questions aside. Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet thanked his development team and PlayStation for believing in Astro, and also paid tribute to Nintendo, recalling how he played Super Mario Bros as a child. He also offered a nod toward 30 years of PlayStation history, which formed the foundation of Astro Bot’s gameplay. A new batch of five levels were added in July 2025, adding five new cameo bots including a couple of Final Fantasy characters.

Still, it offered up a compelling level that was nonetheless engaging. Making your way through one star system after another, you might find your progress blocked unless you scour every level for the robots lost within them. There are 300 to find overall, with many of them depicting classic videogame characters. In that regard, Astro Bot can be seen as a celebration of not only Sony’s hardware and impressive catalogue of software over the years, but also video games in general. It’s fun putting them to work when revisiting the crash site, too, calling upon them to help lift heavy objects and create structures like human bridges to help you continue your adventure and rescue yet more robots.

This is unlocked after completing the Serpent Starway galaxy and requires 90 Bots to build a Bot Wall anytime you want to enter the Ice Temple. Then, just pull back and slam both Wormys to the ground at the same time! Slamming two Wormys with your Twin-Frog Gloves in Wormy Passage will unlock the Double Dug-In trophy. There is a second set of Tripcaster wires in the clearing with the Tallneck.

In Spring-LoadedRun, you will strap on your twin frog boxing gloves and traverse a sunken city ruins. mb66 rolling barrels, swing over daring gaps, and pummel your way to the top of the tower to rescue the special bots. Astro Bot is frankly superb in its execution, offering delightful worlds, abilities, and charm. Its presentation across its celebration of PlayStation’s history is twofold; one where it honors what came before and the other side of the coin in that it shows how much IP PlayStation has intentionally left behind.

Your Review

You tend to start writing lines in your head when compiling a review, and one that stuck with me early was to call Astro Bot ‘the best platformer since Super Mario Odyssey’. Then I played a little more and started to think ‘maybe it’s better’. All I know is Astro Bot is a contender for the all-time crown in a genre that has felt a little neglected (especially by Sony, who once nurtured it to greatness) in recent years. It’s so much more than a PlayStation history lesson, and in climbing above those expectations, becomes a piece of PlayStation history in its own right – with Astro Bot, the PS5 may finally have arrived.

On the cute side of things, Astro reacts to his environments with endearing animations like shivering in the cold, quivering in fear and tapping his tiny metal feet in excitement, and his bot friends are similarly expressive. When Astro boops his head on an impassable ceiling, he makes the sweetest little flinching motion. The bots turn around and shake their booties at Astro right before he punches them into the DualSense. On the pause screen, you can flick all of your collected bots out of the digital controller and they flail in mid-air before landing safely back inside the touchpad. Entire levels are built around Astro Bot’s power-ups, but most aren’t just one-off gimmicks. The story kicks off as Astro is sailing across the cosmos with hundreds of his buddies on their PS5 mothership, just enjoying their quant robot lives.

Since what you’re actually after is the stolen pieces of the PlayStation 5 there’s always an extra level after each of the main bosses that is inspired by a first party Sony game. You can probably imagine what these are already, with the God Of War one giving you Kratos’ ice axe and the Uncharted one having Nate shooting what looks like foam balls at enemies. What results is a 3D platformer very similar to Rescue Mission (which hardly anyone played because it’s VR-only) and Astro’s Playroom (which everyone owns because it’s free with the console).