Astro Boy

Handing a licensed anime tie-in to Sonic Team in 2004 was not the obvious move, and the result behaves accordingly. Rather than the cautious level-by-level platformer the licence invited, this is a game built almost entirely around speed and altitude, where the default state is flight and the ground is somewhere you touch down only when the script insists.

Astro's kit comes straight from Tezuka's original design sheet: rocket boots, arm cannon, machine guns in the hips, finger lasers. The game treats those as a loadout rather than a set of cutscene party tricks. You lock on, close distance in an instant, and mix melee with ranged fire against waves of robots in Metro City's streets and skies. Combat is generous almost to a fault. The lock-on does a lot of the aiming work, and once your power is topped up you can chew through most encounters without much thought about spacing or timing.

That generosity is the honest weakness. Difficulty spikes are rare, the enemy variety thins out well before the end, and the boss fights lean on pattern recognition that never gets especially demanding. It is short too, which in 2004 read as a shortfall against full price and now reads as mercy. What survives is the movement. Very few PS2 games let you accelerate through a skyline this freely without loading seams or a fuel meter nagging at you, and the cel-shaded art holds a clean line even when the camera is whipping around.

The presentation is faithful to the 2003 anime series rather than the black-and-white original, and it leans into the melancholy underneath the property more than you would expect from something aimed at children. Astro is a machine built to replace a dead son, and the game does not entirely pretend otherwise, even while it is asking you to punch a giant robot through a skyscraper.

As a piece of the sixth-generation licensed economy it is unusually well made, and that is worth stating plainly, because most of its shelfmates were not. It will not test anyone who has finished a Devil May Cry, and it does not try to. What it offers is the specific pleasure of being extremely powerful in a small, brightly coloured world for four or five hours, which is precisely the fantasy the character was invented to sell.