{"id":359,"date":"2024-09-07T02:42:21","date_gmt":"2024-09-07T02:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/?p=359"},"modified":"2024-09-07T02:42:21","modified_gmt":"2024-09-07T02:42:21","slug":"astro-bot-ps5-is-phenomenal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/?p=359","title":{"rendered":"Astro Bot (PS5) is Phenomenal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Astro Bot (PS5) Is Phenomenal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro Bot is as close to a perfect game as you could possibly get. It looks beautiful, it performs and controls perfectly, there is not one bad or skippable level in this game. It is pure joy from start to finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a fairly short game. I was able to sit down and get up to the final world in my first day-long sitting and was fairly sad how it was already close to being over, given 100% completion seems fairly easy too. I beat it the next day fairly early in the afternoon. The launch and announcement trailers seem to have a section from almost every level and boss fight rather than just a slice of the available levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s the forever discussion on the US internet about if a game is worth $60, AAA games might be jumping to $70, etc. This discussion is tiring because in NZ, AAA games have been $120NZD or more <\/em>for a long while, equivalent to $74-75USD. Silent Hill 2 will launch here for $140NZD. <\/em>Our games are already more expensive and getting more expensive, so I\u2019m not going to debate the US $60 number, but I will <\/em>say it\u2019s an awful lot of labour squeezed into that $120NZD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My best comparison point is that some games are worth $120 if you put them next to experiences like high tea, a scenic train ticket, attending a concert, and Astro Bot is well worth the price on quality and experience as opposed to length. If you really like to milk value out of your game then you could always pick up speedrunning it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tactile<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro Bot feels absolutely incredible to play. Astro\u2019s Playroom had unbelievable controller feedback and Astro Bot is the same. Every power-up is activated with the triggers, and the resistance makes it feel incredible. It\u2019s like fidget toy satisfying. When you pause the game in a level, you can play with the bots you\u2019ve rescued in that level. I muted my TV at some point and noticed when you move the controller around while the game is paused, you can indeed feel the bots sliding around in the controller with how fine the vibrations are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing is it genuinely doesn\u2019t feel like a gimmick. There was and is substantial frustration that Astro Bot isn\u2019t for PSVR2 (and that Astro Bot: Rescue Mission hasn\u2019t been ported to PSVR2), and while Astro Bot can\u2019t match the immersion in Rescue Mission simply by not being in VR, the controller feedback is so good <\/em>it genuinely feels like adding a whole new dimension to the game. The power-up where Astro turns into a sponge to absorb and expel water, squeezing the triggers does genuinely feel like the pressure of squeezing a sponge. The click when using the time-stop ability is incredible. The clicking with the punching gloves and the way you really have to push the triggers to activate the thruster power ups. Reassembling every ship part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sound Design<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro Bot has such crunchy sound design. Every sound effect is pleasing and it takes great advantage of the speaker on the controller. I assume there\u2019s no stock sound effects, which would be fine to use obviously, but the sound of every power-up and footstep is extremely pleasing to the ear. When you scrub graffiti off the mothership\u2019s covers the controller vibrates and the sound effects are ASMR levels of pleasing. The fact that half of the sound effects come from the controller add so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The director mentioned in an interview if people make enough noise for a PC port that they might consider it, I would hope it gets a PC port so more people can play it, but then I also genuinely feel like they\u2019d be losing so much of the experience unless played with a Dualsense controller. It is that good. The segments that use gyroscope like the ship reassembly or scrubbing graffiti you can easily port to mouse and keyboard but you can\u2019t port the trigger resistance or a speaker on the controller or even the precise vibration. Unless I\u2019m wrong and third party controllers have gotten real good over the past while, but goddamn, only on PS5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So… The Brand<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro\u2019s Playroom originally actually rubbed me the wrong way watching my brother play it on his PS5 (back when it didn\u2019t have a game, so no incentive for me to use it or get one until this year) mostly because as fun as it looked, it seemed like a PlayStation brand-image exercise. I\u2019ve never owned an Xbox or a Nintendo home console until the Switch, and I distinctly remember playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf and feeling weirdly alienated by the way the game made the rarest items references to other Nintendo games, which I had not played and don\u2019t really care for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Playing Astro\u2019s Playroom, I got <\/em>it a bit better, but still wondered how it would work for someone less familiar with Sony\u2019s brand image. And that\u2019s what it is, really, it\u2019s continuing to solidify Sony as a corporation with interesting history and characters tied to it, but corporations are not your friends. Sony has been doing layoffs, too, specifically closing their London studio who were responsible for the EyeToy\u2019s core titles and more recently, PSVR titles. All of the other games represented in Playroom were not necessarily made by Sony but published by them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Countdown (now Woolworths) is doing a marketing campaign where for every $30 or so of groceries they\u2019ll give you a pack of their Disney World of Wonder cards. The package tells you they contain Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel cards, and you open them, and yep. I got a Winnie the Pooh, Darth Vader, and Spiderman, these are definitely <\/em>characters who fit together in a coherent brand identity and not Disney flexing how much of mainstream entertainment they own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Astro Bot trailer came out and immediately heavily focused on the character cameos, now looking even closer to their original designs rather than Playroom\u2019s \u201cthese bots are actors and they are acting out the video game\u201d, I was a little concerned. Not enough to not be extremely excited for the game, mind you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally getting the game, I actually quite like the way the character cameos are done. For a start, the characters are not actually named in-game but rather named after their traits. Jak is named \u201cEco Warrior\u201d, Chris Redfield is named \u201cAlpha Male\u201d (Jill Valentine is named \u201cAlpha Female\u201d, it\u2019s allowed), and Aegis Persona named \u201cProtective Android\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the more obscure cameos, I\u2019m able to get a gist of the character from their description and not feel like I\u2019m being marketed to, because I don\u2019t know what the characters are from, nor their names. They are effectively a second tier of rescuable bot in that they have a special design and perform actions\/animations in the crash site hub level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After each boss in a world, there\u2019s a level themed around a specific PlayStation game series. This was also initially concerning, to me, when the marketing was heavily highlighting Kratos from the newer God of War games. My worry was that the themed levels would be all recent cinematic-style games as a specific marketing push, but I came away pleasantly surprised, because it genuinely seems Team Asobi was able to pick the games they <\/em>wanted to make a mechanic out of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first one of these levels is Ape Escape themed where you get a net power-up to chase the rescueable bots dressed as monkeys around the level and capture them, and a later level is themed around notable current game Loco Roco. The Kratos power-up is his axe, which you can indeed throw and retrieve like you can in God of War 2018 and Ragnarok. They\u2019re lovely additions to Astro\u2019s moveset. Astro TF-ing to gain a beard and a fur cloak is also deeply funny to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end sequence and hub world, you clear \u201cx amount of bots rescued required\u201d by approaching certain points and the bots you\u2019ve rescued will help Astro push things, help him cross gaps or safely drop down giant falls by forming a chain, etc. The cameo bots add to this by being distinct designs who you will be able to recognise in the chain and in cutscenes rather than a dozen duplicates of the same robot. You can follow your favourite character in cutscenes and be glad you rescued them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In General!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game\u2019s power-ups unfortunately don\u2019t get much time to shine, but this was apparently a deliberate decision to avoid scope creep. The impression I got while playing and having power up after power up introduced and quickly abandoned was that the devs didn\u2019t want anything to have the slightest chance of getting stale, so they pretty quickly stash new power-ups before they\u2019ve so much as finished cooling from the oven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It does work to keep the game feeling consistently fresh, and it\u2019s not a bad design philosophy at all. Astro Bot was made in 3 years by a team of 60 people, and at this current moment where AAA games take an entire console generation to make, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, kill half of the developers involved, come out to mostly positive reviews, then fail to turn a profit… we need more games like Astro Bot. Shorter development cycle, smaller teams, tightly controlled scope. Modern games do not <\/em>need to be a developer meat grinder to be good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rescue Mission on PSVR has a weird problem. It\u2019s an incredible game, one of the tightest 3D platformers possibly ever, but it is notably low rent in how few assets it seems to have. Rescue Mission also only seems to have like… five songs? Rescue Mission isn\u2019t long at all either, but some of those songs can get extraordinarily repetitive, and it makes the game feel cheap. Astro Bot PS5 for some reason, straight reuses some of Rescue Mission\u2019s tracks, and a few of Playroom\u2019s too, when I was honestly hoping for more variety. They straight re-use the SSD song but with different vocals instead of \u2018S-S-D\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro has more personality this game than either Rescue Mission or Playroom. Rescue Mission he\u2019s very cute, waving to you whenever you look at him. Playroom he kind of just… pulls out a PlayStation handheld when you leave him idle, but Astro has dozens of new idles and animations. My favourite is probably Astro looking around him and calling to see if any bots are nearby. When you approach a bot who needs rescuing and isn\u2019t in distress, Astro will try to catch their attention by waving at them. He has new voice acting like little noises when jumping or dying, but they\u2019re never annoying or grating. At the end of each level if you shoot the Dualspeeder into the prize box successfully he goes \u201cbye-bye!\u201d. In the graveyard level Astro is more aggressively spooked than he is in Rescue Mission. Given the game leans in hard on branding and other PlayStation IP cameos, I\u2019m very pleased there was effort to give Astro a stronger personality so he feels like his own character rather than just a vessel for gameplay or branding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro Bot is incredible and you should buy it right now. Same week as Astro Bot, Sony released their Overwatch competitor Concord which crashed and burned within the week because as it turns out people don\u2019t really want a new Overwatch or another multiplayer game-as-a-service. It was born on the day I went to switch my GP and died before my new GP could get back to me to confirm they\u2019d received my medical records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t believe in voting with your dollar, the reason games-as-a-service are so popular for companies is that you can get your hooks into gambling addicts and whales to squeeze out a constant stream of cash. Even if your game doesn\u2019t become the new Fortnite you can still have turned a profit based on your target audience being, again, people who have addictive personalities and are more prone to gambling addictions. Games-as-a-service get disproportionate dollar votes because they are designed often maliciously to obtain those dollars. All of that said, Astro Bot succeeding can remind Sony\u2019s execs that AA single-player games are worthwhile to fund. And that Team Asobi are incredible and they should give them lots of money to continue doing exactly what they are doing right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astro Bot as close to perfect as a game can be, 10\/10 buy it now<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astro Bot (PS5) Is Phenomenal Astro Bot is as close to a perfect game as you could possibly get. It looks beautiful, it performs and controls perfectly, there is not one bad or skippable level in this game. It is pure joy from start to finish. It\u2019s a fairly short game. I was able to … Continue reading “Astro Bot (PS5) is Phenomenal”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.clockwork-city.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}