Sometimes when a major publisher refuses to do anything with one of its best franchises, indie developers have no choice but to step in.
That was the case last year with Pizza Tower, a ludicrous ode to Nintendo’s dormant Wario Land series. The indie hit captured the the eccentric thrills of the Game Boy Advance era perfectly and revitalized players’ love for a long lost series. This year, that’s happening again with AntonBlast. The new indie title is another bombastic tribute to Wario’s unique franchise, though it’s certainly not riding on Pizza Tower‘s coattails. AntonBlast is a wild vision of its own that’s far tougher and more hectic. It’s a lot — maybe even for me — but it’s an artistic vision executed with a maximalist wackiness that I can’t help but admire. AntonBlast will either make you feel very young or very old.
In the chaotic 2D platformer, players either control the red-faced Dynamite Anton or Annie. Both are firecrackers that blast through stages with an enormous hammer. Like Wario’s games, levels have players dashing through stages, getting strange power-ups that twist their mobility, and eventually racing back through stages backwards to make their grand escape. Imagine Pizza Tower, but replace all the Italian iconography with constant explosions.
AntonBlast has more energy than a nuclear bomb. It is a creative tour-de-force, from its rich pixel visuals to its wildly inventive stages. Each level is a themed roller coaster ride full of boxes to smash, obstacles to navigate, and secret collectibles to find. In one stage, I’m bouncing off my hammer to stay above a sea of sludge and grinding rails. In another, I’m transformed into a pinball and have to smash my way through machines in between traditional platforming challenges. No two stages are alike, and each one has a dozen gimmicks packed in that it fires off at a rapid pace.
Boss fights are similarly chaotic — and spectacular. In one highlight, I’m smacking a dragon’s massive head as it bounds around the screen. When I finish knocking its health down, I’m suddenly thrown onto its coiled body, where I need to smash through each loop of its tail to make my way toward its head. Imagine the multiphase kaiju battles of Final Fantasy XVI but adapted to a Game Boy Advance game. That’s the kind of retro spectacle AntonBlast achieves.
If this all sounds like a lot to process, let me tell you, it is. As gleefully loud and proud as the adventure is, its purposefully overwhelming nature can make some levels difficult to get through. That dragon boss fight is visually impressive, but there’s so much happening on screen at any given time that I couldn’t keep track of when and how I was getting hit. The same is true for some of its most creative levels, which often left me trapped in unexpected difficulty spikes.
All of that comes back to its combination of tricky controls and lightning-fast movement. Anton and Annie can dash at high speeds, pogo off their hammers for higher jumps, and slide through small gaps. Even after four hours, I was still having trouble executing those actions with precision, as the characters slide around levels like the floors are buttered. A lot of my deaths came from sliding too far off a platform — or, conversely, my jump not taking me as far as I expected. It’s a little unpredictable from a casual perspective, though it feels built for the kind of speed fanatics that’ll undoubtedly master it all.
The underlying struggle here comes in AntonBlast‘s trust falls. In a platformer like this, trust between design and player is paramount. If I speed forward as fast as the game is asking me to, I want to know that it’s going to catch me when I fall. You don’t want to rush into a platforming setup and then die an unexpected death. That happens quite a bit in AntonBlast due to its loose movement. I’d often find myself taking damage as I clipped up against a green flame or tried to slam onto a bounce pad and instead whiz past it to my death. Those moments often made me trigger shy, encouraging me to slow my roll instead of blasting forward. That’s a shame because the fun in levels is directly proportional to how quickly you can move through them.
While I have my criticisms, I can’t help but admire developer Summitsphere’s commitment here. It is going for sensory overload here, and it delivers. This is the ultimate teenage sugar rush. I know that it would have been one of my favorite games at a certain point in my life, and so I know it’ll find a huge audience of supporters just as Pizza Tower did. The more sobering realization, though, is that I’m in my mid-30s now, and my brain and reflexes aren’t quite as sharp as they used to be. The unrelenting speed and clutter of it all is a lot to handle, even if I could still ultimately conquer tough roadblocks with enough focus.
This is gaming cranked up to 11. Proceed with caution.
AntonBlast is available now on Nintendo Switch and PC.