Astro Bot Rescue Mission is a 2018 virtual reality platform game developed and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4’s PlayStation VR headset. It stars a cast of robot characters first introduced in The Playroom and The Playroom VR. In the game, the player plays as Captain Astro, who aims to rescue his lost crew scattered across different worlds. For $59.99, this is quite literally the best platformer out in the current year. There’s TG88 to collect, levels to conquer, and secrets to discover that it actually feels weird that it’s not charged at the normal AAA premium.
As you explore galaxies to find your fellow robots and unlock new parts of the game, you’ll find a lot of familiar elements, only to see them executed in quirky and delightful ways. Just about every platformer has an ability that lets you shoot across longer distances, but none of them let you do it by strapping a bulldog to your back. Many of the bots — 173 of them, to be precise — are dressed as characters from PlayStation games past and present. They’re digital collectible figures, Funko Pop alternatives for 30 years of PlayStation gaming, celebrating almost every Sony property you can think of. Naturally, you’ll find Ratchet and Clank, Kratos, and Nathan Drake here; third-party heroes with a PlayStation connection, like Metal Gear Solid’s Snake and Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter, are also represented.
Astro Bot Gameplay
I went into it with high expectations thanks to Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Astro’s Playroom, and it not only met my expectations, but completely exceeded them. It’s the best 3D platformer since Super Mario Odyssey hit the scene in 2017 and will be remembered as an all-time classic of the genre. Everyone with a PS5 should get their hands on this game ASAP, and hopefully, Team Asobi gets to continue making masterpieces. A new batch of five levels were added in July 2025, adding five new cameo bots including a couple of Final Fantasy characters. There are jokes about tech demo ducks in here, then, but there’s also the sense the whole thing is, on some level, a huge tech demo.
What Are All Special Bots In Astro Bot? Patapon Archer – Tribal Archer
It’s boss fights when you expected them and boss fights when you absolutely didn’t. One level allows you to explore a recognisably domestic world but you can drastically change size, bashing through doorways one minute and wriggling through a gap in the skirting board a minute later. Another lets you transform into an ultra-heavy version of Samus Aran’s morph ball thingy, and has brilliant stuff for you to do once you have. These levels feel so Nintendo-like because they get everything out of their ideas. If you’re small but you can become big, can you blow stuff up from inside? Astro Bot is a platformer that genuinely thinks like the best platformers out there.
Your job as Astro is to go around to all the planets and collect your friends. The games have lots of fun platforming to execute, with grappling hooks and hover-jumps and all kinds of fun things. There are also plenty of alien and robotic enemies and bosses to take on.
It seemed useless; I felt silly for getting stumped by what had been, up until that point, an incredibly simple game. Astro Bot typically displays a little tutorial box for how to use it, but this time, it deliberately left me hanging. Playing a game is like being in a conversation with its developers without the ability to speak directly, and it felt like communication had broken down. Every stage in Astro Bot provides its own challenges, forcing players to think outside the box or make use of unique power-ups.
It’s a grand celebration of PlayStation’s legacy and a sign of what its future can become. What’s amazing is despite how wide-reaching the references are in Astro Bot, this isn’t just a celebration of PlayStation’s first-party stuff but so much of what’s defined gaming for decades. Monster Hunter, Space Channel 5, Wipeout, Legend of Dragoon, Tony Hawk, the list goes on and on.
The first one players build is the gacha machine that they will remember from Astro’s Playroom, and that’s where the majority of one’s coins will be spent as well. Items from the gacha machine fill the hub world out further, and it soon becomes an interactive monument to PlayStation history. Like Team Asobi’s previous games, Astro Bot revolves around a community of tiny white robots. Following the events of Astro’s Playroom, they are attacked by the evil green alien that served as the final boss of Rescue Mission, destroying their PS5 spaceship and scattering them across the cosmos. After acquiring his DualSense controller ship, Astro has to travel to various galaxies and rescue the bots. It’s not all that different from other platformers out in the market right now, yet it’s able to stand out from the rest with its fun and unique gimmicks, amazing level design, and amount of content.
If you have a seminal PS1 game in your mind or a semi-obscure PS2 horror game, there’s a good chance it’s represented here. Aside from a lack of Final Fantasy representation, Astro Bot pays its respects to several generations of formative games. A handful of excellent stages even go one step further by paying tribute to some key games themselves — expect gaming history nerds to go positively feral over them. Astro Bot is an action and platformer game for the PlayStation 5 which features Astro. Jump on your Dual Speeder and explore tons of planets, and meet up with iconic PlayStation characters across the game. Astro’s adventure takes him to various galaxies full of planets to explore as he tracks down his scattered crew.
These special cameo bots are rescued from the galaxies’ main boss fights, which are a real highlight of the experience. Like the rest of the game, Astro Bot bosses are inventive, defying player expectations while still rooted in 3D platformer tradition. The boss fights deliver on visual spectacle, have a nice challenge to them, and above all, are fun to conquer. Besides the main bosses, mini-bosses pop up in other levels unexpectedly, and they are also a lot of fun to fight. Astro Bot is a 3D adventure platformer that features the PlayStation mascot, Astro, as he travels to different worlds in search of his lost crew members and to repair the PS5 mothership.
And an expansion or two like Elden Ring’s or Destiny 2’s The Final Shape. But if we’re talking about full games, GOTY-potential games, Astro Bot is on top. The game has a total of 300 bots to collect and find throughout the game.
Needless to say, Astro Bot exceeded my expectations by being nearly perfect in almost every aspect of the game. The story of the game isn’t all that compelling; however, the fact that it’s able to tell a story and make it understandable without a single line being spoken means something. The motivation of the game is to rescue the missing crew members of the now-broken PS5 mothership due to the damage caused by their nemesis. It’s nothing fancy, yet somehow it’s able to sneak in amazing interactions between the bots, and that just makes everything a lot better than I think it actually is. Astro Bot still takes advantage of the console’s power too, but not by dipping into photorealism or needlessly flashy spectacle. Incredibly smooth performance means I’m never taken out of the flow by frame hiccups.