Game of the Year 2024: Astro Bot

Whimsical Fantasy “How-to PlayStation” Nostalgia

Astro Bot, a Sony Interactive Entertainment platform game published in 2024 (rated E10+), is a multi-themed homage-influenced game that’s packed with stunning graphics, easy puzzles, and a calming soundtrack all rolled into a chillaxing game for the entire gaming community to enjoy. This will serve as an introduction to the game that plays like a love letter to all the Devs and gamers that have made it this far into PlayStation’s 30th year anniversary. A history filled with iconic characters, masterful technological advancements in gaming, breathtaking graphics, and we are here to witness it all. Join us as we embark into Astro’s 5th installment in this grand adventure to save our PS5 and all our friends we’ve made along our 30-year journey!

Below we’ll explore the details you’ll come across while playing this beautifully crafted cute game, and as such, there will be some spoilers! So, feel free to hit the pause, go catch up, play a few worlds, and come back to read the rest. If spoilers are what you came for because you just need to know what’s the deal…. Full steam ahead… read on fellow Blerds, Nerds, Gamers, and Geeks!

***Spoilers From Here on Out***

Whimsical Fantasy- Your hero’s name is Astro and he’s on a mission! Here you play the cutest bot since Wall-E to save his fellow Bots and his spaceship which turns out to be his very own PS5! We find ourselves flying through gaming space and the evil space alien Nebulax destroys our PS5, and all our favorite game characters (the Bots) we’ve played as over PlayStation’s 30 yrs are taken hostage and we are needed to save them all!

The game is played through a massive 90 levels and 60 different worlds with future DLC to come. You go flying through the galaxy recapturing your PS5 components as well as the various saved game Bots you played and saved within your console. This videogame’s

difficulty ranges from easy, normal, to hard with your game play allowing you to swing, climb, jump, punch, swim, and take on superpowers based on new attached Bots to Astro’s body. The colors are vibrant, and the puzzles are relatively easy to figure out. You’ll see gestures, changeable character skins, and a shuttlecraft to go from world to world-which turns out to be your DualSense controller.

“How-to PlayStation”- This game centers around your DualSense controller. It uses innovatively creative scenarios and themes to show you how your DualSense works with game mechanics. By showcasing all the cool new blerdy features you’ll get to “geek out” on in this game, Astro Bot functions as a “How-to” live action manual on what PlayStation has done in terms of controllers and technology and how far it’s come over the years! Much like the days of Minesweeper and Solitaire teaching individuals how to utilize a computer mouse’s features and hotkeys (keyboard shortcut keys), Astro Bot is a brilliantly playful way to show players the “How-to” for all things DualSense and PS5 mechanics! In our adventures flying through PS5 Intraspace, we experience tilt-control climbing with alternating hand grabbing action, as well as haptic reactionary responses when figuring out tactile puzzles that shake upon picking the correct options.

One of my favorites is the breathing feature where you literally blow air into the microphone section of your controller to maneuver flight utilizing force and airflow. We learn “on the go” with short examples on how our physical motions coupled with the intuitive feel of the DualSense controller allows for smooth gameplay and enjoyable nearly 4D interactive gaming!

Nostalgia-Astro Bot requires the player to go through intraspace to collect the missing parts of Astro’s PS5 and various Main Characters from PlayStation’s 30 years of gaming! Over 150 V.I.P. Bots need to be rescued from games from third-party affiliates like Namco, Argonaut Software, Crystal Dynamics, Capcom, Ubisoft, Sega, and Konami to name a few. The nostalgia spans PS’s gaming history and features characters from Ape Escape, God of War, Uncharted, LocoRoco, Horizon and others. In these special levels we take on the skins and play as the main characters of the games within an Astro Bot version of their worlds. All in all, we can collect 327 Bots for now and more should be attainable in the future with DLC.

Game Of the Year 2024-With a fantastic soundtrack, and many action-packed brightly colored themes, worlds, Bots, and abilities, it’s easy to see how this game won Game of the Year in 2024. You have a game that brings you back through the many phases of PlayStation. It draws you in with its quirkiness and allows you to grow up again in simple levels that remind you why you started gaming in the first place. The instant joy upon rescuing the main Character V.I.P. Bots fill you with recognition, giddiness, and connection because the Devs remembered when you played the game, when it was the coolest characters ever, and how much fun it was playing those games. The joy I got from the depiction of our gaming experiences over time all collected within this powerful spaceship

(PS5) being shot by a villainous Nebulax who crashed our system and nearly destroys all our hard work saving all those games over time because wait…all hope is not lost, Astro the hero (and us by extension), can save the day and all our saved content, debug the CPU, repair our console, clean out the virus, and get back to playing…was certainly worthy of playtime and many awards.

It makes sense that a game that tips its hat to PlayStation’s 30 year anniversary, thanks the developers and creators of some of the most iconic games we’ve ever played, and reminds all gamers ages five to 105 why they play in the first place would be applauded with the title of 2024’s Game of the year-Astro Bot!

Check it out, tell us what you think! https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/astro-bot/

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