Astro Bot is PlayStation's Mario Odyssey, and I'm here for it

PlayStation fans are feasting this year, and Astro Bot has got to be the main course.

The fan-reactions to PlayStation’s adorable mascot, Astro Bot, getting another game have been legendary, setting up the platformer as one of the company’s biggest releases of the year.

Check out the trailer for Astro Bot below

After a hands-on with the game at Summer Game Fest, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to another brilliant platformer, Mario Odyssey, or even Super Mario Galaxy. That might be a bold claim, but I promise the games have more in common than you might think.

For starters, there are the stunningly clean visuals. Despite running on the Nintendo Switch, Mario Odyssey looks absolutely fantastic, and Astro Bot looks even better thanks to the power of the PlayStation 5.

Then you can talk about the music, the platforming, the expressiveness of the world and characters and even the overall vibe of both games.

However, at their cores, the reason Astro Bot and Mario Odyssey are similar is in the way they’re different. From what I played of Astro Bot, it felt like the game was constantly throwing new ideas my way, whether it was flying Astro’s ship by tilting the controller, using the gyro controls to paint a wall and reveal hidden platforms, or receiving a power-up unique to that level.

Astro Bot oozes the creativity I’d expect from Nintendo’s games, and it’s partly the reason I suspect it to be a contender for my GOTY if the full game is just as good as my hands-on demo.

It’d be great to see Astro Bot become an enormous series of games for PlayStation, as while some of Sony’s latest franchises over the years have been cinematic masterpieces like God Of War and The Last Of Us, sometimes a silly little platformer can provide a light-hearted break from those heavy narratives.

Astro Bot will release exclusively for PlayStation 5 on 6 September 2024, and I honestly can’t wait to 100% the whole thing.