It seems the surprise popularity of Pizza Tower brought a bit of attention to the Wario Land series, and by extension another upcoming Wario Land inspired game, Antonblast. However, did you know that this won’t be Anton’s first adventure? Indeed, he first showed up in Sonic Spinball for the Sega Genesis! Just kidding, he showed up in Antonball Deluxe. There’s no normal Antonball, by the by, just this deluxe version and the beautifully titled free version, Antonball Deluxe Lite.

Antonball Deluxe is basically the arcade age of Mario meets Breakout. That’s an interesting idea, but I must admit that I was deliberate in my reference to Sonic Spinball earlier. That’s another game that combines 2D platforming with ball-based arcade outings, and I think most would agree that it’s not good. Sometimes unique ideas just don’t pay off. However, Antonball Deluxe does succeed for the most part.

You have a very basic platforming moveset: A dash, jump, and high jump. You need to use these to maneuver Anton so he can knock the ball into the bricks. You can also change the direction of the ball by pressing up and down. It’s fairly simple, but as in most arcade style games, the devil is in the details. Generally, I think the level design is very good. The game starts very simple. The out zone for the ball is narrow, the platform layout is very simple, and there’s no enemies or pits. Once these new ideas are introduced, they’re done in such a way that it’s easy to immediately understand, usually being isolated in a simpler stage. Coins that give you extra points are critically placed in locations that are risky to go to. Likewise, dashing is a way to go faster, but dashing into the ball will make it go flying. If you want to finish the stage quickly for the time bonus this is good, but it can also make the ball harder to keep track of. There’s some pretty fun powerups thrown in for good measure too, most of which really do a good job at making the game more complex. The gun is the best example, as you may try to shoot a brick that will spawn a ball. The caveat is that hitting the brick with the ball makes it spawn two balls instead, so you may want to abstain from shooting the multiball brick in most cases. There’s a lot of little things here that really make the moment-to-moment decision making really fun. My biggest issue with the campaign is that sometimes the ball is just bouncing around in the brick area and you kinda just have to wait for it to come back to start playing again. Thanfully, as the game introduces more enemies and hazards, this becomes less of a problem.

Anyway, let’s look at the other stuff in the game. There’s another mode called Punchball. I admittedly didn’t finish this, but it’s basically the Mario Bros arcade game but you throw a ball to get rid of enemies instead of bonking them from below. Not as intriguing of a concept as the main game in my opinion. This is a fun enough game with its own cool ideas, but I’d rather play the normal game. This mode has just as many levels as the main game too, which I thought was odd. Why not just have 50 levels of the main draw instead of 30 for 2 individual games?

I’d talk about Vs Mode here, but I currently don’t have anyone to play with. I’ll leave a comment if that changes, but let’s go on to the characters in the meantime. Yeah, you can play as 23 different characters. I was kinda hoping that this game would do something similar to Crypt of the Necrodancer where each character is basically a really unique game mode that adds replayability and all, but they all play the same unfortunately. Some of these characters are pretty funny though. You can play as the aptly named ‘Ant on Ball’, or maybe you want to play as Anton’s dog for some reason. Among the goofy cast are a few guests, including Peppino himself. Yeah, I liked playing as him. Most of his animations are made to look like those in Pizza Tower too. There’s also Clive from Clive n’ Wrench, which is a game. I was kinda expecting Voodoo Vince to show up too, but unfortunately he didn’t. I thought all of the characters were neat, but some way to differentiate them from each other could’ve been nice.

Overall, this was a really good game I could see myself coming back to a lot. My biggest fear with Antonblast is that it will be too derivative of Wario Land, but if there’s as much creativity on display in that game as there is in this one, I don’t think that’ll be an issue. 7/10, close to an 8.

This was a fun little game! I really liked how the Antonball portion was a fusion between Breakout while making it platformeresque. Its not perfect, but its a decent little time.

Punchball was more up my alley when it came to knocking out enemies and stuff. Quick to breeze through.

Overall I really enjoyed my experience and I'm glad Summitsphere was able to hit the ground running with what they wanted to pull off. Can't wait for Antonblast!