I can’t quite decide if Antonblast is destructive genius or just a little bit too chaotic for its own good. Following in Wario’s preferred mode of 2D platforming – aka: slamming Anton’s thick shoulders, gritted chin and whirling, Taz the Tasmanian Devil-style hurricane legs into every obstacle going rather than a polite bop on the head a la Mario, Antonblast is big on screenshake, exploding paraphernalia and pinballing through levels like a raging battering ram. It’s wonderfully frenetic, as the two levels in its Steam Next Fest demo make plain.
But it’s also like trying to rein in a bucking bronco a lot of the time, and I always feel like on the verge of losing control. I both love it and hate it simultaneously, so I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that there’s a demo for it at the moment, as you, too, can see if it’s the right kind of platformer for you ahead of its release this December.
The first level in the demo feels like it could be a long lost Wario Land level, albeit with the speed and wrecking ball energy of Sonic the Hedgehog. With all his booze stolen by the devil – who is enraged that Anton has redder skin than him for some reason – Anton sets off through his ramshackle city to bash himself a path to hell, careening into enemies and obstacles that burst into showers of poker chips on impact – a points currency you can’t really do anything with in the demo, alas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up being used for some kind of devilish bargaining cash in the final game.
Anton has a number of moves at his disposal – a charging slam, a wind-up hammer swing, and holding down on a slope will turn him into a furious little bowling ball, allowing him to roll his way through tiny gaps that are blocked, appropriately, by lines of bowling pins. He can also slide through other, emptier little crevasses without becoming a raging Morph Ball, though the best little flourish of animation has to go to Anton’s ground pound, which lets him both slam into teleporting dumpster bins or crunch his cartoon teeth right into the pavement. All of which feels pretty good under the thumbs – there’s a frenetic, flying by the seat of your pants energy to the way Anton moves through each level, and it’s a feeling that’s only heightened when he lands on special jump pads that send him into the background of a level, where he’s even smaller and tinier to manoeuvre across the city’s rooftops.
Enemies are mostly just there to be steamrolled in these early stages, so you can bash through them with mostly careless abandon. But there are also moments where you’ll need to pause, jump and press X for Anton to perform a kind of spinning jump that lets him reach higher platforms than his regular jump – and it’s a combination of button presses that I found always brought Anton’s momentum to a grinding halt. Most of the time, this isn’t really that big of a deal breaker, as you’re free to take your time and approach its challenges at your own pace – which in the demo extended to finding a series of big button switches to detonate colour-coded obstacles blocking my path.
At the end of a level, however, when Anton is forced to trigger a big ‘Happy Hour’ bell and make a mad dash for the exit in just a couple of minutes, the need for a more precise kind of platforming exposes some cracks in Antonblast’s all-encompassing chaos. I get that the added pressure is probably meant to make everything feel even more fast-paced than it already is, but I’d argue that it also needs an overall tightening of its controls to go with it, so it doesn’t risk running straight into a solid wall of frustration.
The second level, though, was quite a bit jollier, not least as it took place in the sewers to give us a taste of how Anton handles underwater (pretty wonderfully, I thought), but also because you’re given a Rambi-style swordfish companion at certain moments, which took me right back to playing Donkey Kong Country on my SNES. Developer Summitsphere have got that Rambi-style movement down to a tee (based on my slightly shoddy memory, at least), and if that wasn’t enough to give you warm nostalgic flashbacks, then Anton was also fired out of multiple quickfire cannons at regular points during that level as well, further strengthening that DK connection.
Based on just this short glimpse, I think I’m more or less on board with seeing the rest of Anton’s journey to hell. I have my reservations, sure, but there’s a Ren and Stimpy cartoonishness to everything here that’s also just too good to ignore. If you enjoyed the similarly rambunctious Pizza Tower last year, then you’ll almost definitely find lots to like here as well.