Astro Bears (Switch)
When I first saw the light cycles in Tron, their concept captivated me. Players were driving vehicles that left long persistent walls behind them, all the participants trying to avoid the increasingly cramped arena as opponent’s ribbons and their own prove to be deadly barriers that are easier and easier to crash into. However, the light cycle concept has a few limitations that harm its potential, those being that the bikes can only make 90 degree turns and actually boxing other players in was difficult when everyone moves at the same speed. However, Astro Bears does have quite a few ideas on how to preserve that game concept while making it more interactive and varied, and all it took was strapping some jetpacks to bears in space.
Astro Bears was first released as Astro Bears Party in 2017, but seemingly as part of the developer SONKA getting full rights to the product, they delisted the original version and released the lightly enhanced version found on the eShop today. Astro Bears takes the Tron light cycle concept into a few new directions for its multiplayer party game design, the most important being how players move around an arena. A match of Astro Bears takes place on a small planetoid, up to 4 players able to run across the entire surface of the sphere as they lay down a persistent energy ribbon behind them. This energy ribbon is lethal for any player to touch, players trying to avoid the ribbons already placed down as they continue to add to them in the hopes that the other player will slip up or be left without options.
The astronaut bears you play as can turn in any direction at any time, allowing for you to lay down your ribbon in whatever way you deem most hazardous, but the bears also pack in a few extra abilities to make things more exciting. A quick dash can let you burst forward and potentially put your ribbon down in front of a player who was not expecting you to suddenly be in front of them, but it comes with that risk of accidentally slamming into danger instead since you’re harder to control at such speeds. Jumping definitely plays a bigger role though, players able to hop over the ribbon to stay in the game longer. The ribbon will keep building while in you’re in the air though, allowing you to place arches that will block future players from leaping up in that area. The last major tool in your kit is your jetpack, this allowing you to extend your jumps since otherwise they would only be able to just barely clear the height of a ribbon. The jetpacks let you buy yourself time to find a safe spot to land, but since they need some time to rebuild energy, you can’t rely on them too much so utilizing them isn’t always your best option for survival.
The movement options at play allow a round of Astro Bears to create some truly intricate ribbon trails, players always forced to move forward and thus trying to find the ways they can squeak through safely on an increasingly crowded planetoid. Focusing purely on survival might work for a while, but being a bit more proactive in messing with other players can help ensure a win if you use your options right. Because the sphere-shaped arena has less and less safe space in a fairly short amount of time, rounds can move quickly even when players are doing well at survival, but it is easy for the concept to lose some of its spark over time. Your movement options allow you to make some bold moves but strategy isn’t too often rewarded, and a victory can feel like it came more from other players slipping up rather than any attempt to be clever. It still has the energy of a reaction focused game and the constant movement means you need to stay involved if you wish to win, but Astro Bears does feel like it might need some form of direct aggression or strategic element if it wants to keep pulling you back for multiple play sessions.
SONKA does have a few ideas for how it can vary the core gameplay though, one of the big ones being the arena size. A small planetoid makes for quick and snappy rounds because the available space disappears so quickly, but if you do want to give players more room to try and pull off dash kills or have a more gradual build-up to the point where someone will likely slip up and crash, the arenas come in medium, large, and super large variants. The planets themselves are always see-through spheres so you can always have some idea of how the ribbon layout is so you won’t often be blindsided by something appearing from across the planet’s curve, but it does feel like something could have been done with the arena to add some easy spice like removing chunks of the flooring or putting pre-existing barriers around.
Astro Bears does have an interesting idea for changing how rounds are played though, that being the option to have ribbons not stick around until the end of the round. After you’ve placed a certain amount of ribbon with this option enabled, the earliest part of your trail will start to disappear. Ribbons not lingering for the whole match can mean even smaller planet battles last longer and things can focus a bit more on trying to trick an opponent into hitting a ribbon instead of hoping they mess up, but it also means that some matches might drag if players are too smart to be caught unaware. On the larger planets it can also be fairly easy to just stall to survive with this option enabled, but it can certainly have its moments so having persistent ribbon trails isn’t always going to be the superior way to play.
There is one area of planning that does always feel like it has a decent impact on the action even if strategy in general is low, and that’s your selection of bear for a round. There are seven bears playable by default in Astro Bears, each with different stats impacting things like their default run speed, how easily they can turn, how much fuel their jetpack has, and how quickly that fuel replenishes when not in use. Picking the panda Xiaoli might seem like a no-brainer when you see they have higher stats than the default bear Neil, but having max speed and high turning means Xiaoli can sometimes be a little too mobile for their own good, making it easier to run out of space. The dopey looking Bishnu has terribly jetpack capacity, but its regenerates so quickly you can keep hopping over ribbons so long as you can land for a second between them. Igor is almost the inverse, sacrificing speed and turning for a jetpack that can hold tons of fuel and regenerates at a more moderate pace. The soldier bear Wojtek and cosplaying bear Aki further play into trade offs between movement options and jetpack power, but the seemingly beginner friendly Cybear with their two lives has the worst stats in the game so experienced players can’t just go on a tear with this powerful bear.
The two DLC bears go with big gimmicks in the form of a midair dash and practically unlimited jetpacks, but for the most part the bears do have an appreciable impact on the way things play out without feeling like the right bear is absolutely key to victory. If anything, picking the ones with more centralized designs can benefit you as much as it might harm you since there does seem to be some thought put into balancing their strengths and weaknesses, but the place this holds most sway is in the Competitive mode where players select a team of three bears and need to win once with each of them to win the entire competition. Here it might be good to have a more extreme bear as a counter to an opponent, but this isn’t exactly chess and victories probably will emerge more from mistakes still rather than some clever counterpicks.
The last mode available is the only one with a single-player component: Jetfish Hunting. Little rocket fish will orbit around the planetoid one at a time, the player trying to grab them to not only earn points but to rack up combos for grabbing fish quickly in succession. Your ribbon will disappear over time and between rounds so this can conceivably keep going as long as you’re able to keep it up, but it also never really evolves beyond that idea so it will only hook people who are naturally drawn to straightforward high score challenges. It can be played with two-players for a cooperative run, but grabbing the Jetfish is actually complicated by doing so since there is more ribbon to avoid and either playing hitting it ends the current run. Jetfish Hunting is the kernel of Astro Bears pursuing ideas beyond the simple act of trying not to crash into walls, but it would have been better served continuing to iterate on the base game rather than throwing in a less than thrilling collection-focused mode.
THE VERDICT: Astro Bears takes Tron’s light cycles and makes them into a more flexible party game, but it still suffers a little for being too simple at its core. Being able to jump, dash, and even fly a little with your jetpack means there is a greater chance to forcing other players into a crash or avoiding one yourself, but rounds do more often come down to not making a mistake rather than players directly seizing a win. Some extra options and elements like the bears having different stats do allow for things to be tweaked a bit more so matches can be more interactive rather than persistent sprints where you avoid lingering ribbons, but other ideas like Jetfish Hunting don’t pull this game away from its fundamentals enough. It executes the basic concept well enough to be a bit of fun, but it doesn’t build enough on it for this to become a staple of multiplayer play sessions.
And so, I give Astro Bears for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. Compared to the multiplayer in a game series like Bomberman, Astro Bears does still feel like you have a bigger impact on your opponents. Their survival will increasingly become harder as you put down more and more ribbon, and some cheeky maneuvers like a dash or making a series of archways and then blocking the ways through them do mean you can earn a win through your own actions as you think about how to sabotage opponents. Some options like disappearing ribbon trails might hamper these on occasion and encourage them on others as factors like stats and planetoid size come into play, but despite having a lot of little variables it can shuffle around, a round of Astro Bears rarely feels like it’s hit some sort of shake up to how you play. You’re mostly just running around hoping that you can handle the increasingly cramped space better than the opposition, and that’s why it does feel like some simple shifts to the basics could have done a lot to spice up each round. Arenas that aren’t just featureless spheres could lead to chokepoints or areas of high danger where placing ribbons could be a bit more strategic and avoiding them more tense. Power-ups could allow for midbattle shifts in fortune, or even giving a few more extreme options to the base roster instead of just the two DLC bears could lead to sessions that feel remarkably different. The baseline battle has a simple appeal as its difficulty naturally ratchets up with time and players react to that in varying ways, but few rounds feel like they’ll leave a lasting impression on you.
Astro Bears does feel like it has a better idea of how to design the basics of Tron’s light cycle concept but still hits on that snag of not having the complexity needed to really realize it as a compelling multiplayer experience. However, Astro Bears is still a decent time with a few friends in the mix as players remain involved and try to react to a battlefield everyone has influence over. Iteration is definitely the key to making this territory control idea of multiplayer competition shine, but it looks like we’ll need to look somewhere else than the little see-through planets of Astro Bears to find that excellent execution of the idea. At least if you do suit up as one of the astronaut bears though you can find a game that is interesting enough with its attempts to bring the concept to life.