Astrorun

Genre: Auto-Runner

Players: 1

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Review:

Astrorun is a side-scrolling Auto-Runner released on Nintendo Switch in 2025 that has players controlling a tiny astronaut jumping on platforms, avoiding pits and spikes, bouncing off of pink balls of gas and temporarily being empowered to float by yellow balls of gas, all with the goal of reaching each level’s end and grabbing the green gem waiting for you there.

The presentation here uses decent but repetitive and not especially noteworthy 2D visuals, extremely repetitive energetic synthesized music, and absolutely no sound effects whatsoever. So… yeah, not great.

The Auto-Run stuff is mostly pretty straightforward, but this game still manages to mess that up in a few ways. First, it does that thing a lot of bad Platformers do where if you’re still holding on to the jump button when your feet hit the ground again, you’ll automatically jump again, which can really mess with precision jumps. Second, there are some massive difficulty spikes early on here. And third, the yellow gas clouds that let you float as if you’re using a jetpack seem to have different predetermined amounts of floating ability, and they don’t indicate when you’re about to run out, meaning you have to just guess when you’re about to lose the ability and a wrong guess can lead to your death as you plummet into a bottomless pit.

In the past, I’ve expressed my strong dislike for the Auto-Runner genre (though there are some excellent exceptions to this, such as Wunderling and Crazy BMX World), and it’s games like Astrorun that are exactly the reason why I so often hate these games. Absurdly high difficulty passed off as challenge and used as an excuse for terrible level design, repetitive gameplay, and an overall lack of creativity or original concepts. Astrorun is no exception in this regard – skip it.

tl;dr – Astrorun is a side-scrolling Auto-Runner that has you using different kinds of gas clouds to reach a green gem at the end of each level. This game’s poor gameplay, poor design choices, and highly repetitive nature exemplify the worst qualities of the Auto-Runner genre, and as such I absolutely do not recommend it.

Grade: D

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