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Astro Bot is a supremely silly and incredibly smooth platformer

Astro Bot is as precise as it is ridiculous, and this is exactly what makes it so damn delightful.

During my 30-minute demo at Summer Game Fest, I crashed into spiky obstacles, flew off the side of sky-high platforms, bounced into deadly projectiles and popped my little robot protagonist like an overinflated balloon — and I could not keep the smile off my face the entire time. The full game will feature more than 50 unique planets of platforming proficiency, more than 300 bots to rescue (more than half of which are classic PlayStation characters), and dozens of weird and satisfying tools to use. A colleague who was watching me play didn’t immediately recognize the Journey character in Astro Bot and I was happy to explain it, automatically recounting some of my own experiences with the game from back in the day.

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