Why Astro Bot deserves the Game of the Year Award (Even if it’s not the BEST game of 2024)

2 weeks ago 12

Team ASOBI’s 3D platformer, Astro Bot, recently received the prestigious Game of the Year (or GOTY) award during The Game Awards 2024. This was a huge surprise for gamers all around the world, seeing as this was an excellent year for the medium, with many solid titles that were fighting for the grand award, like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Black Myth: Wukong and more.

Yes, Astro Bot may not seem all that impressive or ambitious when compared to those solid AAA titles, especially in terms of graphics, narrative, or scope. But it still truly deserved that award, because Astro Bot is exactly what the industry needs right now, and its victory is a huge indication of the direction it should go in the near future. It all comes down to three main reasons: Fun, Accessibility, and Community.

Astro Bot is the perfect single-player adventure (With no unnecessary microtransactions!)

Let’s get the obvious and most important thing out of the way first: Astro Bot is a magnificent adventure with an adorable art style, catchy music, brilliant level design, amazing bosses, and more. We’re not talking about a mediocre game that was competing against masterpieces. Astro Bot is the masterpiece that nobody saw coming, and it’s on the same level as all of its competitors for GOTY (I’d even say that it’s better than most of them, but that depends on each player’s personal taste and experiences).

One of the best things about Astro Bot is the fact that it’s a more traditional, old-school game: a single-player adventure with hours of content that never asks the player to invest any more money after the initial purchase, making it feel like a breath of fresh air for many players. And if that wasn’t already enough, Team ASOBI and Sony have been releasing multiple free DLC levels after the release date, which have been giving fans more fun things to do without needing to open their wallets at all. Curiously enough, these extra levels have been so creative and wonderful that most fans would love to pay money for them.

Why Sony (and the industry) needed a game like Astro Bot right now

The relaxed nature of this game contrasts with the recent rise in popularity of live service games and/or games with rampant monetization, a glaring issue that has severely hindered the gaming industry over the last few years. While companies can occasionally execute this formula correctly, they have also failed on multiple occasions, leaving a very bad taste in their player’s mouths in the process. Just this year alone, Sony released the multiplayer shooter Concord, closed its servers less than two weeks later, shut down the studio responsible, and reportedly lost millions of dollars in the process. In a recent interview with BBC, joint PlayStation CEOs, Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino revealed that they’re very happy with Astro Bot‘s success, a statement that felt very poignant after they lamented the failure of Concord.

Astro Bot’s success is the perfect example of how Sony (and the entire AAA industry except for Nintendo) should proceed going forward: By focusing on fun, single-player games that don’t ask players to spend extra money and stop bothering with fruitless live service experiences that are destined to fail. Granted, some of PlayStation’s biggest exclusives before Astro Bot have followed this formula (Like God of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Uncharted and more) but Team ASOBI’s platformer differs in another, very important aspect that Sony should also pay attention to: It’s scope.

Every moment in Astro Bot is worth it, and it doesn’t waste the player’s time

Another common problem among modern AAA video games is their ambitious but overwhelming scopes. Many titles nowadays have expansive maps with way too much to do, and it may take hundreds of hours to finish its main campaign, let alone complete it 100%. Titles like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Black Myth Wukong are extremely well-made (and excel in many areas in which they are way better than Astro Bot) but they also take many hours to complete, meaning that they are not the most accessible products out there.

Astro Bot, however, is a very simple but extremely endearing and endlessly entertaining video game that anyone can pick up and complete 100% without ever feeling like a tedious chore. In a day and age in which most adults are extremely busy and have a lot of video games to play in their free time, being able to experience something as concise and fruitful as Astro Bot is truly refreshing. Even Masahiro Sakurai, the father of Kirby and the director of the Super Smash Bros series, praised Team ASOBI for this, claiming that Astro Bot didn’t waste his time and that he didn’t have any problem collecting the 300+ different bots in the game.

Astro Bot’s main goal is to keep you, the player, entertained: Every single level is extremely creative and never overstays its welcome, not a single item or bot is annoying to find and collect, the boss fights are epic and engaging without ever feeling unfair or overly challenging and even the extra optional levels won’t take you many tries to complete. If you’re currently looking for a video game that will keep you entertained without ever making you feel frustrated or overwhelmed, then Astro Bot is perfect for you.

A beautiful celebration of the entire gaming industry (And not just PlayStation)

As you may know by now, Astro Bot features countless cameos of many characters from classic titles that are important for the PlayStation brand, which motivates the player to explore every single corner of a level to find them all. And if that wasn’t already enough, the addition of these cameos even resulted in 5 special levels themed around specific IPs, like Ape Escape, God of War, Uncharted, LocoRoco, and Horizon. Of course, this was all very intentional since PlayStation’s 30th Anniversary took place in 2024, and Sony celebrated it in various ways.

This has prompted many people to accuse Astro Bot of being just an “ad for PlayStation”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only because it’s evident that Team ASOBI did this as a labor of love (and not just because their higher-ups at Sony forced them to include all these cameos) but also because they featured many other characters that it really didn’t need to add, nor that gamers ever expecting to see in the game.

Everyone is here! (And Square Enix is also invited)

Astro Bot in his ship alongside Aloy, Nathan Drake, Kratos, Atreus, Aloy and PocoLoco.

Astro Bot has it all: From iconic PlayStation IPs that no longer belong to Sony, like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon, to extremely obscure characters from forgotten games, like Motor Toon Grand Prix or Mad Maestro! Of course, franchises like Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Tekken, or Tomb Raider have been exclusive to PlayStation systems at one point or another, but they have been multiplatform for several years. Because of stuff like this, Astro Bot feels like a beautiful celebration of the entire gaming industry, and not just the PlayStation brand (even if still its main focus).

This is especially evident when taking a look at the community’s reaction to Astro Bot‘s release. Multiple gaming studios (like Naughty Dog or Insomniac Games) shared images of their character’s bots and congratulated Team ASOBI for the release of its game. Even Square Enix, which infamously refused to approve the addition of any Final Fantasy or Kingdom Hearts cameos in the initial version of the game, recently acknowledged the new Gex cameo, so maybe we’ll see more of its iconic IPs in future DLC levels. After receiving the GOTY award, Astro Bot‘s director, Nicolas Doucet, thanked all the people from different gaming companies who gave them the rights to their characters without asking for anything in return. The way in which everybody was seemingly eager to be part of this beautiful gaming celebration reminds me of Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and for good reasons.

Astro Bot is the Mario/Crash/Sonic of a new generation of gamers

When Astro Bot came out back in September, social media was full of people enjoying the game, praising its creative levels, fun cameos, and the clever ways it uses the features of the PlayStation 5 and its DualSense controller. The game made such an impact that I even saw many Nintendo and Xbox fans praising Team ASOBI’s work. Considering that even Masahiro Sakurai praised Astro Bot and that Nicolas Doucet indirectly thanked Nintendo for creating Super Mario Bros. during his Game Awards’ acceptance speech, I can safely say that Astro Bot managed to unite the gaming community in ways I’ve never thought possible, even if it was for a brief period of time.

What’s especially important to keep in mind is that Astro Bot is also going to be many young gamers’ first true video game, something they will be able to complete by themselves or with the help of their parents and/or older siblings (Many of them have even received Astro Bot as a Christmas gift) So, in a way, this little robot is going to mean to them what Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, and other similar platforming mascots have meant for many of us. The developers at Team ASOBI even included the other character’s cameos to intentionally encourage younger players to try out those classic games that we all know and love. And who knows? Maybe Astro Bot will serve as the main inspiration for a similarly whimsical platformer we’ll experience in a few decades.

When Astro Bot wins, everybody wins

Astro Bot on his spaceship, ready for another adventure.

At the end of the day, Astro Bot may not be the most mechanically deep or graphically impressive GOTY contender of 2024, but it doesn’t need to be, because it embodies everything video games should be about: Entertainment, accessibility, artistic vision, and a sense of community. Some of 2024’s best and most popular games, like Stellar Blade, Helldivers 2, or Silent Hill 2 Remake, are represented in Astro Bot via character cameos, and if that isn’t a perfect example of how this adorable game tries to represent all the best aspects of the video game industry, I don’t know what is. I seriously hope Sony will allow Team ASOBI to further expand the Astro Bot IP and greenlights the development of more magical games like this one.

You may have noticed that the only other GOTY nominee I haven’t mentioned is Balatro, and that’s because it actually shares some similarities with Astro Bot (Especially since it’s an indie release, and this game should set an example for the future of the AAA industry, specifically) So, if you’ve already completed Astro Bot and are looking for another simple and addictive video game that also celebrates the industry in its own ways, you should definitely give Balatro a try.

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