A huge game about a little guy who’s mad all the time
Anton is mad. REALLY mad. Satan stole his alcohol, so he wants it back. And that’s the premise of this game. That’s it. It’s perfect. This is an action platformer, and while it doesn’t have the deepest story to tell it’s this general weirdness and some truly hilarious character writing that excels and moves the plot forward. But the story really isn’t a focus here; the focus is, as the title says, that we move fast and blow things up.
The game has us running through levels and bashing and ramming into things. It’s the hyper action genre that games like Wario Land and Pizza Tower epitomize, but taken to a new extreme. We essentially just push the bash button and keep going forward faster and faster, hitting enemies or walls and jumping along the way. It’s hectic, to say the least. We need to constantly go fast and maneuver, often planning ahead and being mindful of what’s behind us or across from us.
We can duck, spin into a sort of bowling ball, jump, dash jump, and break walls to find secrets. We can hop between layers of the world, back and forth and back again, all to try and make it through a level as fast as possible. The game is built around us continually building up speed, with level design often requiring us to max out our dash combo meter to execute movesets and make it through puzzles.
We can also use the hammer — a tool that lets us not only attack but also lets us spin and bounce off walls, adding to the creative movement. We can jump and hit the attack button at the same time, bringing out the hammer and starting a spin. Then if we press the attack button before we hit the ground we can jump with it to keep us spinning. This can send us bouncing off of a wall even higher, propeling to a new location that we need to get to in order to advance.
These are the kinds of level design quirks that we always need to be mindful of, always considering as we’re going forward. And then we have to do it all over again, in reverse, because that’s how these levels act — make it to the end and then run all the way back, potentially seeing the chaos that we unfolded along the way. Do we want to destroy an obstacle to get through it quicker, or jump over it to save it just in case we need it on the way back? These are the decisions that we need to make, in a split second as we’re going through.
Everything organically changes as we’re playing, and it’s terrific. It even factors into some of the different score attack or time attack modes, where we have to (even more) be cognizant of what we’re doing so that we can maximize out point totals.
Antonblast feels so satisfying to play. It’s fast, it’s fun, it’s like a Nickelodeon cartoon come to life. It’s perfect on a handheld (I played on the Steamdeck) and is the kind of game that looks great on a big screen too. Antonblast is an easy title to recommend, and even easier to enjoy.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for December 4, 2024. Images and video courtesy Publisher.
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