Astro Bot review: Corporate synergy, but make it cute!

radiotimes.com:

Astro Bot, the cutesy little blue and white robot, seems to have become PlayStation’s official mascot in recent years.

He debuted in Astro Bot Rescue Mission, a 2018 PSVR game where you guide the adorable bot through a variety of imaginative platforming levels on a quest to collect his equally adorable little friends around the galaxy.

Then, in 2020, it was quite a meteoric rise for Astro Bot. His next game, Astro’s Playroom, was provided for free to every single PS5 owner, helping them get to grips with the new console’s many upgrades. Suddenly, Astro Bot was something of a household name.

In 2020’s Astro’s Playroom, surrounded by relics from PlayStation’s hardware history, you guide the adorable bot through a variety of imaginative platforming levels on a quest to collect his equally adorable little friends around the galaxy.

And now, with both of those previous games being pretty much universally beloved, Sony has tasked the developers from Team Asobi with crafting Astro Bot’s biggest adventure yet. But is it the best one? We’d say yes. It’s certainly the most complete-feeling entry in the franchise. But it’s not without flaws.

In terms of the basic set-up, there’s no prizes for guessing that you guide the adorable bot through a variety of imaginative platforming levels on a quest to collect his equally adorable little friends around the galaxy.

Third time around, we should say upfront that the shtick is starting to feel less overwhelmingly joyously surprising and more like a nice little treat that you knew was coming.

And with so little story to cling onto (the game has no real voice acting, the villain is a bland gargling alien, and the main quest is the exact same as the previous two games), it is hard to form an emotional attachment to Astro Bot.

Story is rarely the main attraction in a platformer, of course, but it is particularly light here. My main motivation to keep playing was curiosity — what will be the fun little twist in the next level? — while my