“A must-play for anyone who loves creative platformers. The worlds are beautifully crafted.” Here are the games released during 2025 that have won major industry awards or received nominations for those awards. We’ll update our awards tracker whenever new awards and nominations are announced. Astro Bot[a] is a series[1] of augmented reality and platform games developed by Team Asobi, originally a group within Japan Studio, and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The series is a spin-off of The Playroom series, and began with the 2013 launch title for the PlayStation 4, and its later entries have won numerous awards. Members of Team ASOBI discuss what it takes to make a platformer feel good.
Vibrant colors make me feel like I’m in a cartoon, but Team Asobi doesn’t flatten its environments or skimp on detail. In one level, I start by walking across swaths of bright green foliage. I feel the crunch of the grass between my metal feet and hear the sound from my DualSense’s speakers. Then I move on to a metallic checkerboard floor, where I hear my legs lightly click-clacking on the tiles.
Each Astro Bot release pushes the boundaries of PlayStation hardware, from PS VR to PS5’s DualSense controller features. The greatest tribute I can pay to Astro Bot is that you forget about all of the PlayStation stuff going on while you’re playing it. Sure, it’s cool to see some forgotten classics in there (Wild Arms made the cut!), but you could take out the Kratos costumes and the game would be as brilliant as it is now.
In each level, the main objective is to rescue Astro’s crew, scattered throughout the game’s five worlds and twenty levels. Players also face bosses at the end of each world, which require a certain number of rescued bots to challenge. The fact is that the game is both easy to learn and play, yet it’s able to be entertaining with the sheer amount of things to collect and discover. While exploring a certain level in the first world, I came across a portal of sorts that actually led me to unlock a few of the game’s secret levels. This made me wonder just how many levels there actually are in the game.
Suddenly, he’s attacked by an unsubtle-as-hell Xbox-green alien monster who trashes his ship and scatters its parts and his 300 friends to far corners of the universe. The game doesn’t seem to use any specific name for them, but players have taken to calling them cameo bots, secret bots, or hidden bots, depending on who you ask. Whatever you call them, they’re made much more reachable thanks to our Astro Bot collectibles guide, which reveals an in-game mechanic that allows you to track down hidden cameo bots with ease. It’s not the only hidden in-game mechanic either, as you can unlock a secret photo mode in Astro Bot, too. The worst sin that a game like this can commit is repetition, and Team Asobi firmly understands that. Platformers like Kirby and the Forgotten Land are at their best when they’re introducing new ideas that consistently surprise players.
Some worlds require special powers to navigate, and those, too, are pretty standard in function if not in form. The monkey power-up lets you scale walls, while the mouse ability shrinks you down to access tiny spaces. There’s even a Super Mario Sunshine-esque F.L.U.D.D power that uses liquid to move Astro around.
What Are All Special Bots In Astro Bot? Ky Kiske – Holy Knight
Whether rescuing lost bots, defeating enemies, or interacting with the surroundings, every action contributes to the sense of discovery. With polished gameplay and a visually appealing world, Astro Bot delivers a fun and rewarding platforming experience. This tribute is never more touching and joyful than in the case of Ape Escape.
Japan Studio was sadly dissolved in 2021, with many of its staff folded into Team Asobi to make Astro Bot. Its wild characters and artful, innovative games are particularly favored in Astro Bot’s directory of PlayStation history. You tend to start writing lines in your head when compiling a review, and one that stuck with me early was to call Astro Bot ‘the best platformer since Super Mario Odyssey’. Then I played a little more and started to think ‘maybe it’s better’.
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Astro Bot’s gameplay and story. Sony intentionally disabled CD support on both the PS4 and PS5, so inserting a standard CD into the console simply doesn’t work out of the box. One of the only PS5 games that really feels like it was built around the DualSense. This focus also affected the platformer’s story, as the game has fewer than 13 minutes of cutscenes.
What Are All Special Bots In Astro Bot? Ronin – Masterless Samurai
A brave and adventurous robot, Astro will stop at nothing to rescue his crew and bring them safely back. In this PS5 platformer, you need to explore every level in search of Astro’s crew mates. As part of our Astro Bot guide, we’re going to show you where to find every Bot in the game. Team Asobi is the last remaining bastion of Japan Studio, the historically creative Sony studio responsible for the likes of Ico, LocoRoco, Gravity Rush, PaRappa the Rapper, and many, many more offbeat classics.
That mothership crash lands on a desert planet after an evil alien attack, and Astro must now travel the galaxy searching for its missing parts and crewmates. Even powers from previous Astro adventures are reinvented to great effect. For example, the Monkey Climber is an evolution of Playroom’s climbing ability, but the assistance of a small robotic ape with huge hands this time means rocks can be hurled and ground pounded to great delight. Laurels are never rested on either, with new ideas and gadgets introduced right up to the final encore.
Hell, it could even be a contender for Game of the Year (GOTY) because of how complete the game is as a whole package. The game is visually stunning, has great sound design, has simple yet fun gameplay, makes use of the exclusive PlayStation controls, and, most importantly, has a ton of content. Sony and Team ASOBI have knocked it out of the park with this game, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this game is regarded as one of Sony’s best releases to date. Astro Bot is PlayStation’s exclusive 3D adventure platformer that features Astro’s journey to rescue his fellow crewmates and fix up the mothership. Read LINK TD88 to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth buying. In its never-ending chase for maturity and realism, the video game industry is leaving kids behind.