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PlayStation VR has for a long time been the most interesting headset on the market. Whilst the stellar visual quality of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive outmatch it by quite a degree, they simply do not have the catalogue of clever games at a much cheaper price point.

Yet, up to this point, we’ve never had any properly fleshed out games. Sure, we have titles like Gran Turismo and Resident Evil 7, but more often than not these VR experiences are tacked on to the main game.

Even the standalone titles like Until Dawn: Rush of Blood and Rigs are okay, but they don’t give you anything meaty. Playing through Arkham VR or Psychonauts and the Rhombus of Ruin is fantastic, sure. But when you’ve played two hours of it and there’s nothing left to give, you’re left feeling sour.

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Enter stage left, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission. Now, I don’t know what kind of magic beans they have over at Sony Japan Studio, but they’ve managed to churn out PSVR’s killer app out of seemingly nowhere. The only unfortunate thing is that its a bit late.

Perhaps it took this long to figure out how to use the headset to its full potential. In which case I understand. Rescue Mission is by far and away the only PSVR game that has tapped into the true potential of the hardware, and I don’t even just mean the dodgy headpiece.

If you’ve ever played The Playroom or its VR counterpart, you will know that the Astro Bots live in the PS4 controller. There is a level of commitment to this idea in Rescue Mission that creates a synchronous experience with your head and your hands that is utterly magnificent.

You play as an unknown robot. An alien has captured all of your little friends and strewn them across five worlds of five levels each, with a boss gating every warp to the next planet.

Beating a boss rewards you with a ship part, and collecting bots fills up your Astro Ship with friends you can hang out with in your downtime, and there’s even a claw minigame where you can collect dioramas of the levels you’ve completed. But honestly, there’s really only one Astro Bot.

Never have I felt such a connection with a VR character, and this isn’t even an emotional game. From a third-person perspective, you control Astro with your hands.

If you stop and look at him he will wave and smile, if he’s cold he’ll shiver, and if he’s scared he’ll let you know. You’re in control of his every move with the controls but this also extends to actions you can make with your head.

To find friends you have to duck around corners and look into nooks and crannies. The level is designed so that exploring with your physical noggin can lead to grand secrets.

You have to physically nut objects to get them out of his way, and at some points blow the sprigs off of dandelions to advance. One of my favourite enemies was a football-kicking robot that required you to play a game of headers with it to defeat it.

The whole experience reminded me a lot of Ape Escape, where curious experiments rewarded you with a cool new monkey to collect. Imagine Ape Escape in VR but chibi robots and you’re pretty much all the way there, and yes, it is as amazing as that sounds.

As well as using your head as a battering ram, there is also a range of immensely clever powerups that are extensions of the controller, from hook shots to water guns and eventually, shuriken. Every time I was introduced to one of these I sat there gawping at how clever it was.

The hook shot is basically a rope that extends from the controller that Astro bot can walk on. If you thrust up with the controller this will make Astro Bot jump on the rope so he can reach items, and this can also be achieved by physically moving the controller so that the rope reaches a secret spot. Genius!

These power-ups were thrown at you in different capacities across the variety of levels and settings in Astro Bot, and no time did I ever find it getting old. By introducing new set dressing and obstacles like the chaos of a funfair or the danger of a dojo, I was riveted in every level, even though the gameplay was functionally the same each time.

You will travel to haunted castles, the inside of a whale’s mouth… and even do battle with a giant monkey on top of a skyscraper made out of PlayStation 1’s. The environment design is haphazard and mental in the best way possible.

The way the game teaches you how to use these abilities is another absolute stone-cold delight. Take the shuriken. You throw these out of your controller by swiping on the touchpad.

Soon after you receive it you’re trapped in a room where the walls are closing in, and you have to lodge shuriken in certain assets to keep safe. However, the game messes with you by putting vertical bars between Astro Bot and the final shuriken spot.

The solution comes almost naturally as you turn your controller and fire a vertical shuriken, but never have I ever felt such a cocktail of emotions, from fear to pure adrenaline and later elation.

Later you are faced with a level full of bamboo, but the plant is carefully designed so that you can finely cut it down to your level to create platforms for Astro Bot to climb up, depending on where you send your throwing star.

Astro Bot understands the anatomy of a good mechanic and it feels staunchly Nintendo in its design principles. This sort of thinking elevates it from a “But It’s VR” game to something that should well be considered amongst the best titles to drop this year.

It's certainly the most hardware-innovative game I’ve played in years. By far the most haptic and joyous celebration of what gaming provides for its customers I’ve seen in 2018.

The soundtrack composed by Kenneth Young is absolutely a career highlight, the summation of his years of work into one highly addicting and sonically pleasing score that I am still thinking about as I write this.

It captures the jovial spirit of the game, with Naganuma-esque vocal samples chopped in with robotic synths. Every environment has a tailored tune and it really wraps up the experience with a big bow and slaps a massive sticker on Rescue Mission that should read “VR is not a gimmick anymore.”

I haven’t even started with the boss battles, masterful symposiums of game design that test your mettle and force your heart to almost beat through your chest by pushing you to the limit.

Each world’s antagonist puts up a fight and requires you to think outside the box about what you’ve been acquainting yourself with for the past hour to defeat it. It would be criminal for me to spoil any of these because I don’t want to rob you of the cheekbone-eroding smile that rose in my face every time I was faced with one of their clever character designs or interesting obstacle courses.

They warp what you know and splice in the unknown in deeply clever ways, ensuring you feel like Hercules everytime you topple the perfectly scaled David vs Goliath battles.

If I had to drag this game, I would say that there are two minor gripes I have that keep it from being infallible. The first is that there isn't much signposting when you lose Astro Bot.

The second is that the difficulty spikes hard at the very end. I managed to beat the final boss in a couple of tries, but I’ve got good enough muscle memory in VR, whereas if I was a newcomer I could imagine that would decimate me with its precise movements and the limits of space among other variables. It felt like it would be unfair to the average player.

This also occurs in the ‘Challenge Belt,’ optional end game content for the masochistic. By the way, the means by which you unlock challenges is by finding invisible chameleons in maps that you have to find just by looking around.

They’ll be stuck to an environmental asset and pop out of nowhere. Sometimes you find them by mistake, but the feeling of pure wonder is all the same.

The game nurtures exploration in a very natural way, and every time I found one of the dorky looking reptiles I was filled with glee.

I’ve never played a VR game that’s tired me out so much just from sitting down, but you genuinely have to lean and move to find your friends and help watch Astro Bot as he traverses across some seriously tricky platforms to reach the end goal.

It takes the moving diorama style levels of Captain Toad and beefs them up into full-blown linear platforming levels that demand to be explored.

People may say PSVR had lost its way recently or that Sony was failing to support it. This game is the ultimate rebuttal to that argument. Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, in my opinion, has single-handedly revived a system that was slowly accumulating dust. In fact, it’s strapped a well-needed rocket of pure potential to it.

It is so far beyond any of its competitors in the field that it makes anything else look pathetic. There is nothing like this on the market for VR users. It makes Super Lucky’s Tale look like a primary school project. No disrespect to the excellent Moss, but it takes one look at its short, charming two-hour concept demo and convincingly knocks it into exile.

If you don’t own a VR headset, finally you have a game that actually matches the promise of its technology, and you should definitely consider grabbing a PSVR if you’re able, just to play this total gem. May I retort that the cheapest headset on the market also happens to have VR’s best game? It’s almost a no-brainer.

If you’re a PSVR user and you don’t own this game… perhaps the headset is gathering dust for you. Fair play, it’s been hit and miss recently, but by god is it time to get the wipes out, because PSVR’s killer app is here, and you simply cannot afford to miss this hardware-defining experience.

THE VERDICT - 5/5

- Reviewed on PlayStation VR

Astro Bot: Rescue Mission is PSVR’s killer app, but it feels redundant to call it anything but a fully-fledged game, one of the first VR titles to deliver on that promise. This is an unmissable step in the right direction for VR, one that boldly pushes away from its current perception as a gimmick.

This is due to the passion of the developers who deeply understand the core of what makes video games fun, and how to tinker with player expectations and master gameplay in interesting ways to create unforgettable results.

The worst part about Rescue Mission is that it released with little fanfare and that most may not play it because of the gusto of other titles surrounding it. If you have PSVR, you can’t miss this, and if you don’t you might want to put a certain headset on your Christmas list.