It's a phenomenal thing, taken even further with adaptive triggers that provide meaningful, forceful feedback. Tiptoe along glass and you'll feel a plink-plonk beneath your fingers elsewhere you'll be buffeted by breezes that seem to roll across your palms, while on beaches you'll feel the shifting sands under Astro's feet. It's not exactly an innovation - jump in the water of Astro's Playroom's Cooling Springs and you'll feel a bloopy splash, an effect that brings to mind the Switch's HD rumble and the fizzing soda sea of Mario Odyssey's Seaside Kingdom - but it's pushed to enjoyable extremes here, with a new level of fidelity. It's almost touchingly retro to see the touchpad wheeled out - but it does work a treat.Īstro's Playroom has a new tool in that regard, of course, with the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller and its haptic feedback. It's a world that's inviting you to prod around, and it's always ready with ever more inventive ways to react to the player - a trait picked up from the more tactile world of VR that the team explored with Astro Bot Rescue Mission. It deserves a place among the greats though - Astro's Playroom has the coherence, character and abundance of ideas, executed with real clarity, of the very best platformers.
#The playroom ps4 review series
There's Lara and Dante and - oh my sweet lord is that a Vib Ribbon reference?Īs much as Astro's Playroom is in thrall to PlayStation's past, when playing through its splendrous levels it's Mario that it often invokes - a compliment rather than a slur, even if the reverence for Nintendo's flagship series might overstep the mark in the case of one particular wriggly enemy. If you've any love for PlayStation you're going to feel smothered, and even the indifferent will surely be swayed by the overwhelming nostalgia on display, something shored up by the dozens of cameos from stars of Sony's past. This is a dazzlingly self-reflective thing: the hidden collectibles dotted around each level are hardware and peripherals that range from the well-known - UMDs! Multi-taps! - to the truly obscure. Popping the eject button on a PS1 here is almost as satisfying as the real thing. The vintage PlayStation hardware is beautifully rendered - as is the whole game - and enjoyably interactive. Elsewhere you'll climb ledges made of DualShock triggers, dodge transistors - hell, you'll even find yourself singing along to a ditty written in tribute to a GPU. There are four worlds with four levels apiece, each world styled after a previous generation of PlayStation hardware: the PlayStation 1's light grey plastic textures the cliff faces of Memory Meadow, its walkways the cables of original PlayStation controllers. It's a piece of impeccable fan service, as is the entirety of Astro's Playroom, its premise a doe-eyed hymn to the history of Sony's video game adventures, from the demo disc that came bundled in with the original PlayStation all the way through to the all-new DualSense controller whose abilities are proudly shown off. Like the best platform characters, he's buoyant with his own inner life even before you've pressed a button - leave the controller alone and Astro will whip out a Vita or a PlayStation VR unit and play happily by themselves. Captain Astro returns, Aibo's distant cousin serving as an affable lead loaded with a jetpack-enabled double-jump and always ready with a gleeful wave to camera. This is another Sony Japan Studio joint, headed up by French designer Nicolas Doucet, and it inherits an awful lot from the delightful little 2018 game. If you've played PlayStation VR's Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, you may well have seen this coming. Availability: Out November 19th on PS5 in the UK (November 12th in the US).Publishers: Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Developer: Sony Japan Studio/Team Asobi.
It's a thing of spark and wit, and quite possibly the best 3D platformer I've played outside of Nintendo's own efforts. Where do you find the heart of a new piece of hardware? Thankfully, Sony's included it on the hard-drive of every PlayStation 5 it's shipping: Astro's Playroom is a pre-installed 3D platformer that puts the console and its DualSense controller through their paces, and plenty more besides. Sony leans into its PlayStation past in this frequently innovative, supremely charming old-school 3D platformer.
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