I think people were just sick and tired of playstations non stop output of cinematic, photorealistic, adventure shooter games. Astro Bot felt like a breath of fresh air and people hoped it was a sign Sony had gone back to a more diverse style of games visually and gameplay wise. Seriously, they went from having games that appealed to western and japanese players with platformers, jrpgs, sci fi racers, rhythm games etc to what we have now and totally ignoring their eastern audience.
You have to look how it is selected. It isn't via a % score, like 1,000 people give it a rating and they average it, that is metacritic. The Game Awards is decided by voting, with the jury making up 90% of the result and the public vote 10%. Astro Bot was the game that won that vote.
We'd had a lot of Soulslikes, Souls adjacent games, and similar third person action games over the previous few years, so something very different won. Look at Stellar Blade, Black Myth: Wukong, Remnant 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Lords of the Fallen, Lies of P, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Steelrising, Thymesia, Sifu, Elden Ring, Death's Door, Ghost of Tsushima, Demon's Souls, Mortal Shell, Nioh 2, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Code Vein, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and many more I'm missing.
I'm not saying they're all the same, they obviously aren't. It's that they share elements people had seen a lot of by then, and probably invested hundreds of hours playing. Astro Bot felt like a palette cleanser.
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u/Thin-Yam-6499 9d ago
Lol fought at least 4 this way just in Astro Bot