We Want to Get Wa-sted

Wario fans, we have been feasting. Antonblast, the sister game to my beloved Pizza Tower, is out! As a noted Wario subject matter expert I was compelled to reach out to the publisher, and Joystick Ventures were kind enough to provide a code early, which gave me an opportunity to play through it early then give it another go on the release build for the sake of thoroughness. While I don’t think Antonblast is necessarily perfect, it is without a doubt the best new Game Boy Advance game I’ve played in years.

For the unfamiliar, let me provide some context: Wario is powered by greed, Peppino is powered by anxiety, and Anton is powered by rage. He has been turned fully red thanks to a combination of fury and chronic alcoholism, and the devil is consumed with envy to the point where he’s sent his minions to yank everything out of Anton’s liquor cabinet. Truly unfortunate! Anton wants his booze back, so he, and his deranged pal/employee(?) Annie, venture into the earth’s depths to beat every single bottle thief to death with a hammer. Basically it’s like Doom, but with platforming.

Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way first: this game’s presentation goes hard. Sprites are expressive, colors are loud, outlines are thick, everything looks fantastic. This does mean that the sheer maximalism of it all can get in its own way. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to tell what the hell just hit you or what’s even going on, particularly on your first pass through a level. This is also where the GBA-ness of Antonblast‘s visuals can be more curse than blessing, specifically how zoomed in its camera is. The sprites are large, detailed, and lovely to look at, but that comes at the cost of being able to see where the hell you’re going, especially during the Happy Hour escape sequences. I’ll concede that this would have been helped a bit by turning down the screen-shake, which I categorically refused to do, but the main culprit is not being able to see more than 5 feet in front of you.

By contrast, the least authentically GBA-ish quality isn’t actually anything mechanical or visual, but the sound. Look, I have a soft spot for many a GBA soundtrack, but it’s undeniable that the system would melt in your hands if it so much as tried to play a single song from this game’s OST. Antonblast‘s audio threatens to smother you at all times. It’s a perpetual cacophany of gunshots, whipcracks, and screaming. So much screaming. Almost constant screaming if, like me, you can’t resist using the dedicated scream button. Couple this with some incredible bangers level after level, always capped off with the bombastic “Outta My Way!…It’s Happy Hour!” blasting its synths in your ears as you obliterate the entire level on your way out, and you’ve got a game that sounds amazing at all times, even if it also demands you turn the master volume down juuuuust a tad.

Wario Land 4 is the game everyone’s going to compare this to, and they’re right to. The structure is the same: go through a level, maybe find some collectables, hit a switch at the end, then race your way back out before the timer runs out. I’m not going to dwell too much on that though, because there are some other particularly notable comparisons that help paint a better picture as to what Antonblast actually feels like. Virtual Boy Wario Land feels like an inspiration, what with the amount of foreground/background jumping you’ll be doing. A friend of mine I showed this to commented that things can often look extremely Earthworm Jim-ish in the character design department, and I think that’s apt. Did you enjoy the Sonic Advance games where you also go incredibly quick and can’t see anything? Welcome home!

Most significantly, and the devs confirmed this specifically so I’m not talking out of my ass here, actually playing Antonblast feels less like Wario and more like a Crash Bandicoot game if it was entirely designed for 2D and momentum-based movement. There are green death crates everywhere, your clutch charge behaves more like Crash’s spin than Wario’s body slam/grab, and there’s a far bigger focus on using enemies as springboards than any Wario game has ever done. The Crash comparison is also a bit aided by the voice acting, specifically Gianni Matragrano as our antagonist, Satan. His interpretation of the devil himself is a perfect blend of sinister and camp, as if the voice director asked him to do his most unhinged Neo Cortex impression after forcing him to watch a ton of Cow & Chicken Red Guy clips. He has more lines than everyone else combined, and he completely crushes every one.

Jumping back to the Crash-ness of its mechanics, this also comes with some of that series’ downsides. There is a heap of trial and error to be had. Bosses and level exit sequences in particular will see you running face first into hazards that you have little to no chance of reacting to first time, much less predicting. Checkpoints are similarly spaced out too, with additional restarts between boss phases making learning the patterns far less time consuming. Antonblast rarely relies on any kind of instant kill shenanigans, but plenty of sections will put you in the grinder until you figure the series of hazards out well enough to stumble into the next checkpoint, health bar all but empty.

We’re ventured fully into Complaint Town, because I have some issues with the control scheme. The game controls on about as many buttons as the GBA had. This is obviously intentional but is arguably a mistake, especially when one of the buttons is dedicated to screaming and another just pops your HUD up. Having clutch and bounce on the same button led to more mistakes and deaths than literally any single hazard the game threw at me. I cannot begin to guess how many times I wanted to land then charge, only to hit the button a split second too early and end up in a momentum-ruining bound that got me hit instead. This was partially a skill issue and on replay I ran into this a lot less, but I’d still prefer to be able to split those functions between two inputs. It’s a shame, because otherwise this game’s controls enable some excellent movement! By far its best bit is tied to the boost system, which speeds you up with continuous well-timed clutches and only goes up as you keep a combo intact. Speedrunners rejoice, you can absolutely schmove in this, you just need to know exactly when and where.

That said, give yourself some time to acclimate and you’re going to be blown away by the creativity on display here. The mid-game in particular felt like the game’s level design peak, where it had enough confidence in the player to assume competence and got to start trying some wild stuff. Some of my favorites include The Big Bath, The Mad Mall, Crimson Factory, and the Freako Dragon boss fight. Late game is a bit more mixed. Antonblast goes for the very old school final exam level in Hell Manor, which has you using every single mechanic in one marathon of a level, and I found it no fun at all, especially when going for the optional collectable areas. The actual finale, though? One of my favorite last bosses in any platformer. Maybe ever, like, of all time. It does everything right and then some. I refuse to elaborate so as not to ruin it! It fucking rules!

To be transparent, no this is not going to supplant Pizza Tower as my favorite Wario-like. PT was a transcendent experience, one that I ended up enjoying more than the games that inspired it, the kind of work with such mechanical breadth and depth that it beggars belief to this day. Even though Antonblast‘s postgame time trials and combo challenges work perfectly well, I enjoy PT‘s challenges more. PT‘s controls and level design make more effort to get the player into a flow state, and its levels are considerably more dense with mechanical complexities. Antonblast, due to its simpler control scheme and zoomed in camera, asks you to just memorize everything in order to execute at a high level. Antonblast is a spirited send-up to its inspirations that iterates in interesting ways, and I do respect that commitment, but I prefer PT‘s willingness to push the envelope and provide a truly singular experience.

You know what, though? Comparison is the thief of joy. My handful of quibbles aside, Antonblast is still really freaking good. It transported me back to my GBA days, specifically as if I was playing it on a TV via Game Boy Player with a better controller. It’s big, it’s explosive, it’s pure action, and even when it’s not at its best it’s just fun. I can still recommend it to folks who like what they see, especially if your tastes and sensibilities align directly with the games that inspired it most. The only real downside to Antonblast is that we’re unlikely to get another game remotely as Wario-pilled in 2025.

7/10

Review code provided by publisher.