Astro Bot

The controller speaker is generally quite loud but outside of that, which I wouldn’t attribute to the issues you’re mentioning, then I haven’t noticed any problems myself.

I have tried playing through the tv and controller but experience the same issue.  Weirdly, I don't think my controller is that loud even when turned up to the max.

OK, well there are rumblings that something isn't quite right.

In Playroom I enjoyed all the little sounds, even raindrops hitting an umbrella sounded good. I'm just not getting any of that in this one, something is definitely off.

I have shelved it until further notice, hopefully they will recognise an issue.

I played Playroom entirely with headphones and all sounds were heard and it sounded fantastic.

Go back to the first world, play the level where you shrink down in size.  There is a part where you zip on a couple of wires. Listen to the sound of it and tell me it doesn't sound like a garbled, low quality mess.

I'm telling ya, something is off. 

Do the little twinkly purple and pink clouds on the space map ever turn into anything?

What. A. Game.



I'm both really happy and yet actually a bit sad that it's all over. Think I might have to break out the PSVR1 again and play Rescue Mission!

Definitely not the controller in our case. I had to turn the amp down twice during the session and the combined change would be enough that in normal viewing (of a film) would make the difference between the edge of too loud for comfort and too quiet to hear all the dialogue.

It's not really a gimmick though, not in the negative meaning. As SkillUp mentions in his Astro Bot review, the problem is that almost no other devs have utilised the controller in the way that Asobi/Sony first party do.

Everyone has access to the same features in the controller, no-one puts any effort into using them. I'm generally surprised when I hear even the controller speaker being used, never mind the haptics or adaptive triggers.

Otherwise known as the Nintendo Effect

Did the spring go? That's not their fault it's Sony's as they are flimsy as fuck.

Re: the controller effects not being used by other games, the other issue is that basically everything is multiplatform nowadays. Unless Sony dump money on a developer to do it, they aren't going to want to put unique features into one version of the game and make other platform owners believe they are going to get a lesser version.

There are a few games that use some light effects. Playing Cyberpunk on PC with a PS5 pad and there is some nice trigger stuff going on as you drive and you can feel the gear shifts (there is probably stuff on foot too, but I switch to keyboard for that). Alan Wake 2 also has raindrops gently peppering your hands. You aren't going to get any developers going more than that though if they want to release across multiple platforms.

I think they did improve it in later versions of the pad but my launch one broke as well. Need to get around to fixing it at some point.

I didn't notice any sound issues.

Ok so ref the sound issues, I decided to play Astro Bot some more last night but NOT use my headphones.

It is much improved without headphones. There are a lot of sounds that use the controller speaker which don't seem to get fed through the headphones. I had a much better time with the game last night and played it for about 3 hours.

This game was obviously designed to be played without headphones. I'm still not entirely convinced nothing is wrong though, some sounds are still a little on the quiet side. I would also rather not listen to sounds out of a tinny sounding speaker. I played through Astro's Playroom solely with headphones and that sounded fantastic.

Oh well. At least I am enjoying it now the way it was obviously designed to be played. So my advice to everyone is to NOT use headphones for this game.