Astro Bot Rescue Mission neatly unfolds platforming’s trick and tropes with immunity from the traditional hazards of virtual reality. Immersed in Astro Bot’s kinetic charm and engaged by its clever novelties, you’re left admiring the medium’s strengths rather than cursing its limitations. Astro Bot is a treasure for PlayStation VR enthusiasts.
Modern virtual reality—2016’s beacon of Future Tech and one of gaming’s most dramatic gambles—has proven extremely difficult to get right. Games with a free-roaming camera tend to make people sick, equivalent AAA experiences (with exception) feel alarmingly brief, and generic shooting galleries dominate the landscape. Virtual reality’s general stability feels precarious when it should be prodigious.
Astro Bot Rescue Mission exhibits few of VR’s vices. A bright and animated third-person platformer with a fixed camera certainly isn’t the first pitch for an appealing VR game, but it’s one of the strongest Sony, or anyone else, has thrown in 2018. By learning from the medium’s shortcomings and either addressing or avoiding its pratfalls, SIE Japan Studio has crafted a game that is mature in its medium, innocent of its sins, and comfortable inside of its own skin. Astro Bot Rescue Mission’s (which is an effective but obtuse title) performance convinces the player that virtual reality could easily conceal its limitations as strengths,
Point to Nintendo EAD’s Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for an unlikely but apt analog to Astro Bot’s predicament. A platformer without a jump button seems to violate a core tenet of the genre. In spite of this, Captain Toad thrives by making the player pay close attention to their environment on top employing Mario’s cavalcade of chaotic opposition. Restrictions drive a creative response in any medium that calls for imagination. Astro Bot simply chooses virtual reality—the format that makes people sick and the interface that requires every user to wear weird and dopey headgear—as its empowering catalyst.
Based upon Robot Rescue, found as a single level as part of The Playroom VR, Astro Bot cultivates twenty levels and six boss battles from its origin story. Eight tiny robots are scattered around linear, three-dimensional, and environmentally diverse levels. The player controls a tiny, wildly emotive robot with the DualShock 4 while the player’s head “exists” in-world as trailing support robot. Both can interact with the environment simultaneously. The tiny robot can punch objects and enemies, uses a laser-firing hover pack to glide, and surmounts any number of basic platforming challenges. The player can head-butt obstructions and, more importantly, change their own point of view to either gaze inside of obscure areas or peer around corners. Reaching the end of a course finishes the level while locating all eight robot buddies completes the mission.
Boss battles rearrange Astro Bot’s mechanics to suit a more traditional method of call and response. You’ll need to make a giant colorful bird slam down on a target, disorienting it, before you can send a leash out to crack it in the eye. The giant mechanical shark—everything in Astro Bot maintains a robot-first aesthetic—dispenses waves of lobsters in tricky patterns before you can toss dynamite in its mouth. While bosses damage schemes are traditional, their balance of power is anything but. Astro Bot leverages virtual reality to push all six as close to your face as possible, creating a substantial level of intimidation. Each one was a pleasure to perfect.
The player, existing as a sentient presence in the word of a 3D platformer, presents a point of view unique to virtual reality (well, and that one boss fight in Battletoads). It’s de facto second-person point of view. Lucky’s Tale and Moss made a concerted use of a similar direction, but neither managed to integrate it like Astro Bot. Noticing something out of the corner of your eye like a breakable wall or suspicious gap in terrain and hearing positional audio of a stranded robot drives personal curiosity and tests intuitive dexterity. Astro Bot presents numerous instances of puzzles and platforming and ensures one can’t persist without the other.
The only flaw in Astro Bot’s presentation is its insistence on forward progress. It is impossible to move backwards. It makes sense in both the context of the game (you’re two robots pushing through a calamitous level) and its technical construction, but it’s a pain to realize you overlooked a stranded robot and must restart the entire level in order to acquire it. Between how well-hidden some of these robots are, along with the primal drive to collect coins (for use in an extraneous crane game), levels are somewhat intended to be replayed but it can also weaken Astro Bot’s raw sensation of discovery.
Comfort options are integral to discovering more of Astro Bot’s magic. The controller is a constant virtual presence and, thanks to context-sensitive transparency, never interference. It’s also part of Astro Bot; rescued bots pop open the virtual touchpad, hide inside, and celebrate whenever a new member joins their ranks. The touchpad itself can be used to fling shurikens, fire a water hose, and toss out a grappling line. A ghost image of the shuriken, for example, ensures aim is true. The controller also has to be “locked in” to start every level, complex platforming rarely joins touchpad objectives, and, most importantly, the “camera” remains stationary as it follows your tiny robot along the course. All of this is incredibly smart! Astro Bot’s performance feels like a true second-generation virtual reality title, one that has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors and tries to be better.
It doesn’t hurt that practically everything the bots do is cozily adorable. They never speak—I don’t recall any actual words in the entire game—but they emote, flutter, and twist and appreciable energy. Most are imperiled by their current status; on the edge of a precipice, wrapped in a spider web, or trapped by ghosts can’t be encouraging. Rescuing them issues a celebratory series of responses culminating in a party on top of your virtual controller. Astro Bot’s feedback mechanisms foster endearment and inspire progress.
Difficulty may be an area of Astro Bot some find uneven. Roving hordes of enemies offer spiky, electric, and other nefarious means of resistance. With the exception of a spinning top, which requires a charge attack, almost every one can be eliminated through casual button mashing or the hover lasers. I think this is OK! Astro Bot’s rewards come as much from environmental observation and intuition as they do formal combat encounters. Challenge levels, unlocked by identifying a sly chameleon hidden in every normal level, modify levels and bolt-on goal times. Astro Bot creates its post-game challenge through tests of efficiency, the only apt trial once its secrets are already revealed.
Despite its presence in an unstable medium, Astro Bot has the fit and finish of a first-party Nintendo game. Its environments—scorching lava, tropical beaches, dank caves, an amusement park—are of a shiny and composed standard synonymous with Nintendo’s routine shine. Replaying the original Robot Rescue prototype reveals the care and attention applied to the final product. Fluid robot animation, believable and gorgeous looking water, an absence of bugs, and a diverse suit of environments could easily stand alongside Nintendo’s modern lineup. Astro Bot is polished beyond expectations.
During Astro Bot’s seven or so hours I stopped noticing it was a virtual reality game. This is the most effective compliment I can pay Astro Bot. Away from PlayStation VR’s honeymoon, I’ve become more cognizant of its flaws and less patient with its interface. It’s become arduous to lock my cats away upstairs and unpack the mess of cables and equipment necessary to make VR happen. I still enjoy virtual reality and remain eager to see new ideas, but I also want it to be over as quickly as possible. This never happened with Astro Bot! Its seamless presentation, benign character, and shrewd production make it feel like a, well, normal videogame. Ironically, its performance also suggests it’s anything but ordinary.
