Antonblast

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Antonblast is a Platformer released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024, and let’s just get this out of the way right now: you can’t truly talk about this game unless you talk about two others: Wario Land 4, and Pizza Tower.

Wario Land 4, released on Game Boy Advance in 2001, was a game that I felt was a return to form for the series after two slow-paced Puzzle-Platformers, bringing the series back to a zany, untethered feel that was driven into overdrive at the end of each level when you needed to speed your way back through to that levels’ start. And Pizza Tower, released on PC in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024 seemed to aim to capture this manic energy. However, I would argue that Antonblast has now triumphed where I felt that Pizza Tower only partly managed to succeed.

Antonblast absolutely thrills in destruction, making it a visceral treat to smash through anything and everything thanks to some wonderfully rough sound effects that seem to evoke early 2000s sensibilities, along with colorful, wildly expressive 2D visuals with a rough, “chunky” look that is clearly evoking the way many Game Boy Advance games looked.

But more than the look and sound of the game, moving around and rampaging through obstacles and enemies in Antonblast is fluid and delightful in a way that encourages players to keep going, keep smashing more stuff, with the game even providing a combo meter that keeps running as long as you can destroy anything or collect a casino chip (this game’s version of coins) before a meter runs out.

The game lets players combine jump, attack, and stomp buttons in different ways, such as letting you do a spinning attack in mid-air to bounce off the ground and gain even more air, or run and hold down the stomp button to do a sliding attack to take out obstacles in narrow corridors. You’ll soon learn not all obstacles can be immediately destroyed – some require a rolling slide down a slope, some require temporary power-ups, some require you to hit the four switches found in each level, and some are activated or deactivated when you reach a level’s end and, much as in both Wario Land 4 and Pizza Tower, must race back to the level’s start.

Wario Land 4 isn’t the only game from that series to receive a shout-out here, either – players will frequently find themselves jumping into and out of the foreground of levels, something we saw done in Virtual Boy Wario Land well before this gameplay mechanic was used in the Mutant Mudds games, Donkey Kong Country Returns, or Super Mario Bros. Wonder. As an aside, I know it’s commonly accepted that the Virtual Boy was an absolute disaster, but there were some genuinely great games among the 22 titles released for that platform, and Virtual Boy Wario Land was absolutely one of them, and still to this day possibly the best Wario Land game.

Er… anyway, back to Antonblast….

While Antonblast is mostly delightful, its biggest frustration is that it must, by necessity, occasionally force players to slow down their rampage and actually be a bit more careful. Green boxes work much like Crash Bandicoot’s TNT boxes and are to be avoided, and difficult jumps need to be approached more carefully, and the game does an excellent job of making the player not want to be slow and careful. Also, sometimes there’s so much going on onscreen that it makes it difficult to process everything.

Still, while Antonblast forces players to occasionally stop their destructive rampage for a moment even though they won’t want to, this is still a true delight of the game, one that was clearly created with a vision of what it had in mind and did a phenomenal job executing that vision. If you’re a fan of Platformers, particularly those that have a faster, frenetic pacing, this is definitely a game you’ll want to try.

tl;dr – Antonblast is a Platformer that channels the frenetic energy of the classic Wario Land games and delivers a delightful whirlwind of destructive energy, one that is so viscerally delightful it feels like it crashes to a halt when you actually need to take a moment to be more careful. While these moments may perhaps be necessary, they slow down the flow of what is otherwise a delightful game that Platformer fans should absolutely get their hands on.

Grade: B+

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