August is an odd time of year. If you like football, it’s a great time to be a gamer, but if you’re looking for something else, it’s typically a pretty dry month. So when one of Sega’s top developers releases an odd little title about an underwear-clad robot who flies, it seems worth a shot. After all, how bad could a Sonic Team-developed game be?
Apparently, it can be pretty bad, if it’s Astro Boy.
Astro Boy is based on the anime series of the same name. Not being a fan of the series (or anime in general, really), I can’t comment on how faithful the video game stays to the original series. I hope that it isn’t, though, because the story is trite at best and downright nonsensical at worst. From what I could gather, Astro Boy is a boy robot who was activated and then immediately thrust into public service, sent on errands to save Metro City from various threats, while picking up pieces of his origin along the way. It’s not much, to be sure (and it approaches the point of being nauseatingly moralistic at times), but it gets Astro Boy from stage to stage, and little more.
Unlike most of Sonic Team’s other recent games (notably Sonic Heroes and Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg), Astro Boy is not a platform game, though it certainly does seem that way at first glance. The best way to describe Astro Boy is as a 3D, aerial beat ‘em up. The basic flow is that Astro is sent one on mission or another, travels to his destination via the hub of Metro City, and then trashes a few enemies before he is presented with a boss battle.
In fact, until the very end of the game, Astro Boy feels very much like a string of boss battles with some brief filler in between. This is fine, to a point, since the boss battles are nicely varied, and each has its own distinct patterns to counter. In fact, even when the bosses go down easily (which they often do, unfortunately), the battles are generally pretty satisfying and fun.
If only the whole game truly were made up of boss battles, then Astro Boy might garner a fairly decent score. However, just about everything between boss battles ranges from tedious to boring to downright frustrating. The aforementioned Metro City hub, at first glance, seems to imply that there will be some GTA-style freedom to be found in Astro Boy. However, the game is painfully linear, often employing invisible walls to funnel our protagonist toward his intended destination.
Navigating the stages themselves is generally just a matter of beating up on enemies until a boss arrives. Only the final two stages provide anything more than an open battlefield to traverse, and those consist of battling through the same two rooms with different enemies several times over. Note that there is no exaggeration here; the rooms are so alike, and there are so many similar rooms in each of those stages that I questioned whether I truly was progressing, or if this was like the area in the original Legend of Zelda where you would simply go through the same area over and over again until you discovered the right way to go. Had it been the latter, I might appreciate the designers’ cleverness; alas, they simply seemed to be too busy to design ten distinct rooms for each of these stages, so they instead designed two for each and then cut and pasted them into the rest of the stage. Needless to say, this is extremely poor level design, and certainly not what one would expect from the designers of the Sonic the Hedgehog games.
Astro Boy’s combat system is unique, though the execution does fall short a bit. Astro gains a number of abilities as the game progresses, ranging from a simple punch all the way up to his famous 1,000,000 horsepower. One of the earlier abilities is a spin attack, which allows the player to hold down the square button to cause Astro to home in on his target and charge into them repeatedly. This ability more or less trumps almost every other combat move in Astro’s arsenal, as they all are either cumbersome to use or barely effective. Astro does have a simple punch that he can use, but actually lining up next to an enemy, both vertically and horizontally, is a chore at best, and the punch combos typically knock an opponent away, causing the player to go through the alignment process all over again. There are also a laser, which cuts about as well as a butter knife, and a chargeable arm cannon, which does a respectable amount of damage but also requires several seconds to charge up, leaving Astro very vulnerable to attack. So gaining abilities as the game progresses is a non-event; you’ll try the weapon out once or twice and then go right back to the spin attack, since there is often no reason to use anything else.
To make matters worse, not only are most of the weapons useless, but the awkward control makes using them a chore. Astro can fly around at two speeds; he can either float around at a walking pace, or use the spin attack as a boost to cross long distances faster. The problem is that each speed has its own distinct set of controls. At normal speed, the left thumbstick moves Astro around horizontally, and the right controls his altitude, which takes a lot of getting used to at first. However, while flying with a speed boost, the player is holding down the square button, so the left thumbstick controls both his directional movement and his altitude. Neither scheme is particularly intuitive, and letting go of the square button immediately drops the player from one scheme to the other, which can be incredibly disorienting.
The control doesn’t improve outside of the movement scheme, either. X is a context sensitive button, which allows Astro to interact with his environment, or punch enemies as a default. Of course, if Astro is not close enough to a character to talk to them, he will punch instead, and he can hit someone from considerably farther away that he can speak to them, which makes them angry and unresponsive for a while. (Of course, given that only two or three characters have anything meaningful to say anyway, this often isn’t an issue.)
Camera control is a pain as well, relying on the shoulder buttons instead of the left thumbstick. This makes very little sense, as much of the action takes place above and below Astro, but the camera can only be rotated from side to side. R1 can be used both to center the camera behind Astro and lock on to enemies, but Astro can only lock onto enemies that are on the screen, so as soon as an enemy moves out of sight, the player must rotate the camera frantically looking for the enemy again so he can continue to battle. Again, the poor camera control makes this more frustrating than it needs to be. To add insult to injury, there is no camera control at all while Astro is dashing about with his spin attack, which is made even worse when Astro runs into something and ricochets in a random direction, usually toward the screen; at that point, the only recourse is to stop, rotate the camera, and try again.
Graphically, Astro Boy is extremely unimpressive. Basically, it looks like a first-generation PS2 game, flagrant jaggies and all. Given what has been done with the PS2’s hardware as long ago as last year, with titles such as Jak 2 and Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, Astro Boy looks like an anachronism. Random slowdown is prevalent in the game, and most of the environments and characters aren’t much to look at, frankly. There is never the rush of flight and speed that one would expect from a game like this.
Astro Boy’s sound is decent, but not groundbreaking. The background music is serviceable and doesn’t grate as the game progresses, but it does repeat several tracks over and over and you likely won’t remember any of them as soon as you shut off the PS2. The characters are voiced by the voice actors from the anime on which Astro Boy is based, and though the dialogue often falls short of thought-provoking, it at least is delivered believably (unlike some other games that Sonic Team was responsible for).
Overall, Astro Boy is a huge disappointment, and even more so because it comes from Sega’s flagship development team, as opposed to being yet another rushed-out licensed title. This game easily lacks more depth than any game that I have played in the past year, if not longer. While normally I would complain about the fact that a game is only four hours long with no replay value whatsoever afterward, for Astro Boy that is its one saving grace, because you’ll be able to finish with it quickly and then move on to another game that is more worthy of your precious gaming hours. In short, avoid Astro Boy at all costs; even $5 for a rental is too much for a game that is over almost before it has begun and fights you every step of the way between the opening sequence and the end.
