Astro Bot ended 2024 as the highest-rated game of the year on Metacritic, and it took Game of the Year at the Game Awards 2024, the 21st British Academy Games Awards, and the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. Team Asobi’s 3D platformer arrived that year to mark PlayStation’s 30th anniversary, and it does what anniversary projects almost never manage: it earns the nostalgia instead of just selling it.
It is the fifth game in the Astro Bot series, following Astro’s Playroom in 2020, and the first Team Asobi shipped after separating from Japan Studio.
Trailer, via PlayStation.
A DualSense Controller and a Scattered Crew
The premise is small and it knows it. Astro is the robot captain of a mothership shaped like a PlayStation 5. He and his crew of Bots are exploring space when a green alien named Space Bully Nebulax attacks and rips out the mothership’s CPU. Astro is knocked unconscious; the ship crash-lands on a desert planet, and the crew and the mothership’s core systems are scattered across the universe.
Astro is revived by his Dual Speeder, a smaller ship modeled on the DualSense controller. From there he reactivates satellites, explores galaxies, and rebuilds the mothership piece by piece. The structure is clean: each galaxy hands you a job, each job hands you a part, and each part gets you closer to Nebulax.
Mighty Chewy, Wako Tako, and the Boss Parts
The boss fights are where Astro Bot’s design sharpens. Each of Nebulax’s minions guards a piece of the mothership, and each confrontation is built around the part it holds. Astro pulls the system memory out of Mighty Chewy the gorilla, the solid state drive out of Wako Tako the octopus, the graphics processing unit out of Lady Venomara the snake, the cooling fan out of Mecha Leon the chameleon, and the ship covers out of Falcon McFly the bird.
That is a gimmick on paper. In practice it gives every fight a reason to exist beyond being another fight, and it keeps the campaign moving at a pace most platformers lose somewhere in the middle third.
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Power-Ups From Springy Punches to a Giant Sponge
Astro’s base move set carries over intact from his earlier appearances in Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Astro’s Playroom. He jumps, hovers, punches, and spin-attacks, and the underwater swimming from Rescue Mission returns after sitting out Playroom. The DualSense controller features include adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, the same set Astro’s Playroom used.
The power-ups are the other half of the pitch. Team Asobi describes them as handcrafted to level up immersion, running from springy punches and rockets all the way to a giant sponge. In our reading, a sponge sounds like a joke. It plays like a level design problem the studio actually solved.
Ape Escape, God of War, and the V.I.P. Bots
Astro Bot’s guest content is the part that could have gone wrong. Along the way, Astro rescues V.I.P. Bots — guest characters pulled from other games — and explores planets built around Ape Escape, God of War, Uncharted, LocoRoco, and Horizon.
The comparisons to Nintendo followed quickly, particularly to the Super Mario series, and they are fair without being the whole story. Astro Bot applies a similar level of craft to a different set of toys. The planets based on Sony’s own catalog are the tell: this is a game about a company’s history that still remembers it has to be a game first.
Here is the release schedule that shaped the year, for context on what Astro Bot was up against.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2024 | Astro Bot launches on PlayStation 5 |
| 2024 | Finishes as the highest-rated game of the year on Metacritic |
| 2024 | Wins Game of the Year at the Game Awards 2024 |
| Undated in the source | Wins Game of the Year at the 21st British Academy Games Awards |
| Undated in the source | Wins Game of the Year at the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards |
The PlaySquadron and the Black Hole
The last act earns its sentiment. Once every part except the CPU is recovered, Astro and his crew board ships based on older PlayStation hardware and form the “PlaySquadron” to take the fight to Nebulax, who has spent the whole game harassing the helpless CPU. Astro recovers the CPU. The crew defeats Nebulax by blowing up the spaceship he is attached to, which opens a black hole that begins pulling him in.
Nebulax grabs Astro to drag him down too. The crew grabs Astro to pull him back. Astro, refusing to let them sacrifice themselves for him, lets go and falls into the black hole, which explodes into a supernova. The crew mourns him, and the credits roll.
That is a real ending. It commits to a cost, and it does it in a game whose entire surface is bright, friendly, and built for a family audience. Team Asobi did not have to go there.
What Astro Bot Gets Right
Astro Bot’s move set is identical to Astro’s previous incarnations, and that is a feature, not a shortcut. The game never asks you to relearn how Astro works. It asks you to relearn what a room can do with him. The DualSense features were already proven in Astro’s Playroom; whether they carry more weight here is a judgment call, and ours is that they do.
The single-player structure is the right call. Astro Bot is a third-person platform adventure with action and science fiction themes, and it has no interest in being anything else. There is no live service scaffolding, no seasonal content, no reason to keep you logged in past the credits — and that absence is an observation about how the game is built, not a claim the source makes. It is a PlayStation 5 exclusive that behaves like a PlayStation 5 exclusive should.
The one thing worth flagging is that the game’s affection for PlayStation’s back catalog does a lot of emotional work. If the V.I.P. Bots and the hardware-shaped ships mean nothing to you, the finale still lands — Astro’s sacrifice does not depend on recognizing a console — but the surrounding texture thins out.
Our Score
Astro Bot is the rare anniversary project that improves on the thing it is celebrating. It takes the DualSense showcase from Astro’s Playroom and builds an actual game around it, then builds a story around that, then sticks the ending. The Game of the Year wins at the Game Awards 2024, the 21st British Academy Games Awards, and the 28th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards were not a sentimental vote for a mascot. They were a vote for level design.
The Metacritic placement — highest-rated game of 2024 — is the headline, but the more useful fact is that Team Asobi’s first game after leaving Japan Studio is its best. That is the part worth watching. A studio that just proved it can do this on its own has no obvious ceiling, and Sony has no obvious replacement for what it does.
Astro Bot earns its place next to the platformers it gets compared to. It is not a tribute act.
9.4 of 10 — IGDB critic aggregate score, across 7 outlets.
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