It could be argued that Nintendo’s truest legacy in games is in carving out fun new niches and then leaving them unfulfilled. There hasn’t been a new Wario Land game since 2008, and fans of its anarchic, aggressive brand of kleptomaniacal platforming has been going hungry, last year’s fantastic Pizza Tower aside. Enter Antonblast, ideally through a solid brick wall, leaving a big Anton-shaped hole.
Launching this Tuesday, this is one I’ve been looking forward to for a while. It’s yet another take on that Wario Land formula—smash your way through a level, blow up something load-bearing and then scramble back to the start as everything crumbles and the timer ticks. It’s a simple formula, but a really fun one. Loud, fast and deeply cathartic, and judging from the first couple levels, Antonblast lives up to its inspirations.
Where Pizza Tower felt like a modernized tribute to Flash-era games, with sharp, clean and relatively high-resolution lines, Antonblast is trying its damndest to look like a long-lost Game Boy Advance game, bitcrushed voice clips and all. It’s an impressive commitment to the bit, channelling all the energy of MTV-era cartoons of the era, full of Beavis and Butthead, Rocco’s Modern Life and Ren & Stimpy energy.
That means that it’s rude and crude. There’s some cussing here, and Anton’s big motivation for going on his screamy cartoon rampage today is to recover his collection of spirits, which have been stolen by an army of mole-people working for Satan. Satan is, of course, jealous that Anton is redder than him. Look, it’s an anarchic cartoon—don’t think too much about it.
Screamy is the order of the day, too. There’s a button specifically for yelling at stuff, and it’s weirdly cathartic. While Pizza Tower was fueled by Peppino Spaghetti’s high-grade Italian anxiety, Antonblast is about being mad as hell and solving all your problems by hitting them with a hammer (or mace if you choose to play as Anton’s demolitionist co-worker and drinking buddy Annie). Super-jumping is done by slamming your hammer into the ground, and swinging rhythmically while running makes you faster and faster. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, after all.
My only real concern is that the commitment to the GBA aesthetic may go a tiny bit too far. The aspect ratio might be a little wider here (which is honestly best for a high-speed platformer) but there’s some real chunky pixels on display here, especially when Anton or Annie hop into the background, reducing them to just a handful of pixels across. Cutely nostalgic, but might make things a little hard to parse once the action really heats up.
Antonblast is out on December 3, with its scrappy multiplayer predecessor Antonball Deluxe on sale for just pennies.
