Antstream Arcade (PS5) Review – An Army of Nostalgia

If you had told me as a kid that all the games I’m currently playing I’ll be able to play alongside 1300 others on a single system, I would have bitten your hands off, apologised and then felt disappointed I ate your hands. I digress, the point is excitement would have taken over to such a degree I would have lost control a little bit. I can’t be blamed for my actions, I’m just a kid. 

Still, here’s Antstream Arcade, an app now available for PS5 (alongside most everything else) that offers access to a metric ton of legendary (and rubbish) retro games for a nominal fee. It’s all available once you’re subscribed and you can play games from a ton of different consoles from yesteryear, allowing you to bathe in the wonder of classic Pac-Man up to PlayStation titles such as, and I’m not joking, Premier Manager 98. On my PS5. Absolutely wonderful. 

Each game is streamed to your system from that wondrous cloud thingy, and Antstream have done very well in ensuring you’re into your games as quickly as possible. I haven’t yet been waiting any more than a few seconds for a game to load up and it’s to the credit of the app that I’ve not noticed any real latency in my gaming. Granted, I have a 500mb internet connection at home so I wouldn’t expect to, but I can’t imagine it’ll take an awful lot of internet grunt to ensure your gaming on Antstream was as seamless as mine was. 

I went fairly hard once I had access to Antstream’s collection, and checked out Metal Slug, reminding myself why this game is exceptional. With explosions going off all over the place and a constant movement, Antstream kept up the entire time and there wasn’t a single moment I didn’t feel like I was in complete control. God, Metal Slug is good.

If your internet can stream smoothly, you’re going to have a fantastic time with Antstream. The vastness of games on offer is overwhelming, and it’s a joy to scroll through and see a highlight from your childhood staring back at you that you would imagine would have been lost forever. From the Commodore 64 to the original PlayStation, there’s a huge breadth of gaming history here preserved for a whole new audience and it’s an utter joy to explore and you can simply just play whatever the heck you want whenever you want. Jumping from R-Type to Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis then to the entire Bitmap Brothers catalogue in a single bound was, for an old timer gamer like me, a glorious way to spend a weekend. To play them on a PS5 felt illegal – playing them on a PlayStation Portal felt like I was in the Matrix – and there’s something hilarious about using the power of my PS5 to play Impossible Mission II from the Amiga but damn that game was everything to me as a kid. 

For every Impossible Mission II and R-Type though, there’s a few hundred games here I can imagine you’ll never touch and that’s because they’re a big bag of nothing. The Antstream Arcade collection is very good as a curated treasure trove of classic games, but it’s mostly filler. Again, this will depend on your connections with these games. Whilst I’m probably never going to play Pinball Dreams: Ignition from the SNES era, that could be your favourite ever game. Nostalgia will hit you like a wet fish the deeper you go and you may just find that game you were playing in your bedroom when you should have been asleep. 

A quick warning regarding games included with licensed music. As you might imagine, those licences have long since expired, so any game that includes anything copyrighted has been silenced, which is odd. It’s a little tough to get used to but you’ll soon move past it. It’s a shame but as music and games can be so tightly connected in classic games, it’s a tad disappointing, but understandable. 

There are some nice modern touches also such as save slots which allow you to play a game and come back to it whenever you fancy, but the social aspect of the experience has been heavily focused on here, and Antstream players will have scoreboards and challenges to compete for on certain games, bringing back that old school arcade competition to modern consoles along with Trophy-like challenges such as rescuing a number of POW’s in Metal Slug. It’s a nice addition with the added bonus of more challenging, er, challenges which you’ll need to access with Antstream’s in-app currency of gems (all earnable the more you play the games included).

These are all neat touches that add a little more value to your subscription. Being able to challenge other Antstream players that are checking out these classic games alongside you and bringing back that classic competitive nature is an absolute treat.

So is it worth the cash? I would say yes. For £32.99 you’ll get a 12 month sub and you can access absolutely everything the service offers across that year. No, you won’t find a huge amount of absolute stone cold classics here (there’s no Mario or Sonic representation here, for example), but there’s still more than enough great titles here that will keep you more than entertained for the whole year round. If you’re properly in love with the service you can pay £79.99 for lifetime access, ensuring you’ll never lose your access to the games available and your progress will live on forever more. It’s a great value package, and you never know what will come to the service later on. Perhaps we’ll see Sonic and Mario someday? The former maybe. Still, you can play bloody 40 Winks on this thing and that might just be worth the admission alone.

So it’s not a perfect service and they’re not all absolute bangers, but Antstream Arcade offers more than enough to justify its subscription price and more, with a treasure trove of delights from way back when, and games that you may have always wanted to try but never quite found the time. Now is the time.

Antstream Arcade is available now on PS5 (review platform), Xbox, PC and mobile

Developer: Antstream Arcade
Publisher: Antstream Arcade

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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