It's Black Friday week, so if you're a PlayStation fan, you might have your eye on that sweet Spider-Man PS4 bundle. If you already have a PS4, then you may be looking to finally pick up the amazing God of War, or the now classic Uncharted 4, or Horizon Zero Dawn, or even the dramatically cinematic Detroit: Become Human. Maybe multi-platform is more your style, so perhaps GOTY contender Red Dead Redemption 2 is on your radar, or perhaps you're just wanting a truck-load of Fortnite V-bucks so you can buy all those sweet skins.
What if I told you that PSVR should be on your shopping list, along with a copy of a little game called
Astro Bot Rescue Mission? As it turns out, the game currently has a bundle of its own--packaged with a headset, a camera and the equally breathtaking Moss--on sale now at GameStop* for a reasonable $199.99. If you've never tried PSVR, or you're simply curious about the best of what the system has to offer, you might want to consider grabbing one of those bundles. But what does Astro Bot have to do with it, and is it really that good?
You've got your largely linear levels, which are actually more akin to something like
Crash Bandicoot or
Super Magnetic Neo than
Super Mario 64. The whole setup is probably closer to
Super Mario 3D World. Then you've got your coins, which you collect throughout the beautiful stages to spend later on a cool redemption crane game, in which you earn pieces of miniature 3D playsets to run around in at your leisure. And since this is an official rescue mission, there are plenty of wayward Astro Bots, eight of them per level that you need to find and save. This creates some nice replayability, since some of these little guys are really well hidden.
Speaking of hidden things, one of the aspects this game does best is force you to look all around while playing, and I'm talking
all around--360 degrees. There will be times when you need to crouch over to look inside caves, gaze up at perilous walkways as your hero tightrope-walks across dangerous chasms, watch your robot friend zip through an awesome roller coaster track from afar, and then other times when you'll hear the cries of a sad lost bot stuck somewhere behind you and thus need to turn around completely to find it. Like the brilliant
Moss before it,
Rescue Mission plops players down into believable fantasy worlds, fills its landscapes with whimsical characters and devilish traps, and most importantly of all, shows you the true potential of virtual reality via bespoke experiences.
