Astro Boy
Sonic Team does it again! (Disappoints us, that is.)
Tags: Astro Boy Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Ludwig on Oct 25th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Astro Boy (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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To play Astro Boy is to experience disappointment. Unlike its spectacular GBA brother, the PS2 outing of the courageous little robot is not nearly as graceful in its handling of Osamu Tezuka’s characters and ideals. With a decidedly wobbly grasp on them, the game stumbles awkwardly, trips over its own feet and falls down the stairs, promptly smashing all the good stuff in a spectacular display of clumsiness. A glance at the floor reveals bits and pieces of greatness, though in its broken form it’s not much use to anybody. In steadier, more ambitious hands, Astro Boy could have been something splendid.
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Almost all of the game’s strengths can be discovered and appreciated within the first ten minutes of gameplay, making the gradual onset of discontent later on all the more painful. Having taken control of Astro Boy, you’ll step out on a sunny balcony and have your entire field of vision occupied by the futuristic metropolis of Metro City. The game conveys an impressive sense of scale, with daunting buildings filling the sky and brazenly towering over your comparatively puny stature. It’s when you activate Astro’s rocket-powered feet and take flight, however, that your exploration of the city becomes engaging.
Z
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ipping in-between skyscrapers with Popeye-like arm heroically pointing forward, Astro Boy conveys an addictive and immediately satisfying sensation of flight, something that’s vaguely reminiscent of Sonic Team’s Saturn masterpiece, Nights: Into Dreams (just make a sequel already!). The controls are well laid out, with the right analog stick controlling altitude and the left determining direction. It’s a rather intuitive setup that becomes second-nature right away and allows you to effortlessly glide through the city. When you grow tired of flying about aimlessly, there are two options open to you: Go to the next event location (see: level), or attempt a timed race through several sets of rings spread throughout Metro City (another nod to Nights). Should you decide on the latter, you’ll come face to ugly face with some of the game’s major flaws.
It’s at this point where that horribly annoying and patently patronizing paperclip from Microsoft Word pops up on the screen.
Hello! I see you’re writing a review of a Sonic Team game! Would you like me to insert the following comment: “The camera sucks.”
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Yes. Reacting at a glacial pace to all your movements and not putting even the slightest hint of effort into keeping enemies onscreen, the camera does indeed suck. The shoulder buttons allow you to rotate the camera, albeit slowly and with the constant feeling that you’re fighting a hopeless battle. A similar feeling prevails when facing enemies, as the camera issues coupled with the game’s erratic enemy lock-on system results in loads of off-screen attacks and unnecessary frustration. As the majority of fights involves you targeting enemies and punching, zapping or crashing into them, it doesn’t help much when you can’t really see what’s going on.
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Perhaps then it is a good thing that there aren’t that many battles in Astro Boy. Actually, there’s not a whole lot going on throughout your so-called adventure. The game’s structure mostly has you flying through Metro City, which acts as a level hub, and going to specific locations where you’ll briefly converse (it’s only polite) and fight with bosses. Though there are two proper levels in the game, they’re so poorly designed and traumatically repetitive that you’ll probably just try to erase them from your mind as quickly as possible. Had the game taken the Spider-Man 2 approach and gone with an open-ended city where Astro Boy could daringly rescue innocent civilians and thwart mechanical menaces as he came across them, it would have had a whole lot more substance to it. As it is, the game can be completed in a matter of hours and poses absolutely zero challenge. Hell, the game will even pause, gently take you by the hand and whisper into your ear exactly how to defeat an upcoming foe. It’s pretty insulting, really.
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Difficulty aside, it should be said that Astro Boy’s epic boss encounters are well executed and make good use of the robot boy’s many powers (as well as the integrated Havok physics engine). There’s nothing quite like ripping a streetlamp out of the ground and beating a giant robot senseless with it, right before grabbing his feet and flinging him into the side of a building. Even the game’s peppy soundtrack rises to the occasion and lends a bit of clout to the fights. It is at these moments when Sonic Team’s overall vision starts coming through and when you most realize what the game could have been, had it not been for the many careless mistakes made during development.
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Something which could have used more development…actually, make that any development, is Astro Boy’s aesthetic aspect. Featuring the kind of blurry, single color textures that game designers see in their nightmares and the blandly constructed environments that make them wake up screaming, the graphics are quite dreadful. Aside from Metro City, areas are claustrophobically fenced off by invisible barriers, contain only a sparse amount of objects and have a very washed-out appearance to them. There are anti-aliasing issues, draw distance issues and, wouldn’t you know it, even framerate issues. The game looks like a PS2 launch title and even had that been the case, there would still be a large number of concerned parents making every attempt to shield their children’s eyes from these vile visuals.
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As is the case with Astro Boy: Omega Factor, the game contains a host of cameos by other Osamu Tezuka characters. If you can find them loitering about, they’ll often give you little sub-quests to complete via the use of one of your powers. It certainly seems like a good idea, but when you’re ordered to perform such astonishing feats as talking to a bunch of dogs or fetching an obscure pot plant, it quickly degenerates into an irritating waste of time. What’s truly annoying, however, is the speed at which the text appears on the screen when a character is talking to you. In the time it takes for a person to greet Astro, you can read a book, write a book, learn to play the harpsichord, construct a life-sized model of the Eiffel Tower using toothpicks, figure out why the game’s sound refuses to work with the PS2’s optical out (how’d that happen?) and invent a time-travel device which you can then use to visit your past self and tell him/her to skip the whole conversation since it basically isn’t worth it.
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Come to think of it, you could probably use your time-travel machine to go back and warn Sonic Team about how disappointing Astro Boy turns out. Hey, printing out this review may even be of help, especially if you point out this rather crucial paragraph. Astro Boy is one of those games that alludes to good gameplay… only it never quite materializes. Brief flashes of greatness here and there make you believe that if you can just tolerate the problems a bit longer, the game will reward you. It doesn’t. Even though there’s some fun to be had by flying around Metro City and engaging in some cool boss battles, these aspects only serve to illustrate how much better the game could have been. It’s like getting a fancy, gift-wrapped box for your birthday. You can imagine a million different things inside the box, but none of them match up to the hastily scribbled IOU note you find inside. Sonic Team owes us a better game than this.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Flying = Fun + Good control layout + Cool boss battles |
6.5 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- Terrible graphics - The camera sucks - Annoying side-quests - The game lacks any real substance - Too easy, too short |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Astro-nomically disappointing. Better stick with the GBA version. | |
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Tags: Astro Boy
Posted by Ludwig on Oct 25th, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
