I’m going to start this review with one thought: I had no interest in playing this free game that the Playstation 5 came with, and I ended up with a platinum trophy a few hours later.
Astro’s Playroom is a charming platformer game where you play as a robot exploring the different parts of the Playstation 5, it’s hard drive, fans, memory, and more. This is a little bit of a strange flex to me, but it works really well as an introduction of what the console is capable of, as well as being a demo for the controller’s haptic features as well. While the game is not particularly difficult, the great visuals, many references to other games, and easy to achieve completion goals keep it engaging from front to back.
One of the biggest highlights to me were the raining sections, the sound from the controller and the light scattered vibrations were extremely immersion enhancing. Additionally, the speedrun levels are a great little challenge, especially as somebody who already loves speedruns, although I will say I’m much more tempted to try doing a few any% speedruns of the game rather than playing the speedrun levels for ranking that way. The movement mechanics on ice are also incredibly fun, your character ice skates around and I think it is a little faster than walking as well, and the skating sounds from the controller are, once again, fantastic.
So, in terms of the bad things, each world has 4 levels, the first and third are normal platforming levels where you get to just play around as your astro bot, these are where the game really shines. The second and fourth levels are a little more sketchy, each world has a different mechanic for these levels where you put on a suit of some sort and have an entirely different set of controllers. The world where you become a ball is great, it plays like Monkey Ball, which is a fantastic series, likewise, the rocket ship levels are also a lot of fun and control really well. The frog levels are okay, the gameplay is fine, but slow, I will note the sounds from the frog jumping are absolutely obnoxious and extremely loud compared to every other controller sound. Lastly, the monkey levels involve a lot of motion controls and are so extremely tedious and uninteresting, I think the concept was there, but the gameplay definitely was not.
Final Score: 8.8
Astro’s Playroom’s gameplay lives up to the charm of its worlds, and it is compact and beautiful in a way that makes it an incredible short experience and tech demo. I will also put forward that may favorite levels in the game are the electric one in the storm clouds, and the ice skating one, they are super well made and the movement and timings are extremely fun to play around.
I would say that I recommend buying this game, but it’s free if you buy a PS5, so, if you do just that don’t skip out on Astro’s Playroom, it’s worth the time. That said, that’s just my opinion, so let me know what you think, and if you want our opinion on the Playstation 5, we released an article the day before this one with a review of that hardware, so check that out.