ANTRO – PS5 Review

ANTRO comes to us from Barcelona-based developer Gatera Studio, the studio itself being founded in 2022 specifically to develop and release ANTRO. Depending on context, antro can mean cave, den or dive. In this case it’s a mix of the first two.

Self-described by Gatera as a rhythmic video game where urban music is the main protagonist, practically, it’s a 2.5D platformer with some occasionally taxing sections and several autorunning gauntlets set to some rather nice music composed and produced by in-house musician and audio lead Martí Valverde.

Set in a post-apocalyptic subterranean city underneath what remains of Barcelona, you play as Nittch, a graffiti artist who appears to be just going about his business until he finds a message from his unseen sister. Nittch also doubles up as Deliveroo/Uber Eats style courier, with a large orange backpack being his most prominent feature.

The city you live is ruled by a totalitarian government with the big bad being known as La Cúpula. That translates as The Dome, your most recent delivery is apparently the mechanism to bring down this government. Quite literally sticking it to the man in that regard.

The apocalyptic event is known somewhat ambiguously as The Collapse, with only 1% of the world’s population being left after said event. We can only imagine that the rest of the world’s cities are in a similar state. ANTRO itself has the archetypal slums in the lowest level with the inhabitants living hand to mouth and the rulers being in the upper levels.

All forms of self-expression have been outlawed and you’ll encounter the apparatus of the regime, all drones and automata that’ll end you, as soon as look at you. Soon enough you’ll run into a rebellion of sorts, calling themselves Los Discordantes.

Ostensibly you’re meant to be solving puzzles and moving around via parkour, but practically in that doesn’t really pan out. You’re only really called upon to throw yourself around during the autorunner gauntlets we already mentioned. They’re fun enough, though they become a little irritating when you realise a certain destructible collectible shows up in a few of them.

Though we found that despite getting a perfect run and timing our attack, we didn’t manage to destroy them. Along with the other few collectibles we missed due to their being off the beaten track, it will soon dawn on you that ANTRO doesn’t really amount to much more than a bunch of nice tunes with a mobile quality game thrown in.

Another frustration of ours was the fact that while collectibles have associated trophies, the level select that handily becomes available once you’ve completed the levels in question, omits whether you’ve still got a collectible left to gather in a particular level. It’s a little quality of life improvement we’ve grown used to in this sort of game, so for it to be absent feels like an oversight.

Gameplay itself is fairly generic and dare we say, uninspiring into the bargain. Sometimes you’ll be called upon to nail some tricky sections but the disconnect between your controller inputs and what transpires onscreen is somewhat galling. We played one section with fans late in the game rather more often than we’d have liked for example, mainly due to woolly controls.

In conclusion then, ANTRO is a nice concept we suppose but it’s so generic as to be indistinguishable from any other number of 2.5D platformers. The music is pretty nice though.