Astro Bot is the game you buy a PS5 for

It is 9PM, and all I want to do is sleep. I barely have the energy to speak, let alone play a video game. But I have a job to do, and it's reviewing Astro Bot by its release date, so I make a deal with myself to play just two levels, then go to bed…

Five hours later, my face burns from smiling. I'm convinced I could build, then run through, a brick wall. That's the type of way Astro Bot will make you feel.

Astro Bot, out now on PlayStation 5, is a collect-a-thon platformer. You play as the robot Astro adventuring in space in his PS5-shaped mothership with 300 of his friends - some of them simple bots, others robot-ified versions of famous video game characters. Suddenly, he's attacked by an unsubtle-as-hell Xbox-green alien monster who trashes his ship and scatters its parts and his 300 friends to far corners of the universe.

Astro Bot is filled with standard platformer tropes, but it pulls off a sense of wonder in their presentation. As you explore galaxies to find your fellow robots and unlock new parts of the game, you'll find a lot of familiar elements, only to see them executed in quirky and delightful ways. Just about every platformer has an ability that lets you shoot across longer distances, but none of them let you do it by strapping a bulldog to your back. 

The different levels Astro explores have themes that you'd expect. There's a jungle planet, a volcano planet, and worlds of pirates, ghosts, and gardeners. Some worlds require special powers to navigate, and those, too, are pretty standard in function if not in form. The monkey power-up lets you scale walls, while the mouse ability shrinks you down to access tiny spaces. There's even a Super Mario Sunshine-esque F.L.U.D.D power that uses liquid to move Astro around.

The developers at Team Asobi didn't reinvent the platforming wheel here, but like any good platformer, it's the unique ways the powers are used that make them special. Instead of water, that F.L.U.D.D. power-up sucks up a green goo it then spits out to create platforms of grass. I giggled like a toddler using it to defeat a special enemy by literally sucking its green, goopy brains out. 

One power-up - which I won't describe beyond saying it's really cute since figuring it out is a big part of the fun here - truly captures the essence of Astro Bot. When I first found it, I could not understand it at all. It seemed useless; I felt silly for getting stumped by what had been, up until that point, an incredibly simple game. And unlike with most of my pickups, the game wouldn't help me. Astro Bot typically displays a little tutorial box for how to use it, but this time, it deliberately left me hanging. Playing a game is like being in a conversation with its developers without the ability to speak directly, and it felt like communication had broken down.