Developed by Gatera Studio and published by Selecta Play, Antro is a new 2.5D platformer that won’t take me very long to review.

“ANTRO. The underground revolution. Join Nittch and Los Discordantes in the race to overthrow La Cúpula. In this rhythm, action, puzzle and 2.5D platforming game, music will be your ally!”

Let me just cut right to the chase. Antro is short, very, very short. I got to the end credits in around an hour and 30 minutes. If you want to find all of the items/collectibles, you can probably add on another 20 or so minutes. There’s really very little game here. Playing as Nittch, you have to deliver a package set in a post apocalyptic-dystopian future. That’s about as much of the story I can tell you for a couple of reasons. First, there really is very little story and the game just ends with no real resolve. Second, the game is mostly in Spanish and even when setting the language to English in the options, there’s still a ton of Spanish.

The gameplay here is pretty bog-standard and you’ve seen it all before. The platforming is often quite imprecise and Nittch is very “floaty” when jumping and he does this animation of stepping forward when he lands. This does make some of the platforming really annoying. The game is (kind of) split into two styles. You have your standard (mostly) left to right platforming where you control Nittch directly. Then there are these runner sections where Nittch is being chased and you don’t control his running, but you do have to time jumps, slides and hits. This is where the rhythm aspect comes into play as the jumps, slides and hits are timed to the beat of the music.

Throw in some rhythm-based button presses for “puzzles” (I let the word “puzzles” do a lot of heavy lifting there) and you have a fairly average 2.5D platformer that has some platforming flaws and overall, a rather bland experience. The idea of using music as gameplay element is a great one, it’s just not implemented very well here. The very short experience is reflected in the budget price of around £13.There’s nothing wrong with a short game, if that game is good. For me, Antro was extremely mediocre and there’s not much here to enjoy. The only element I really felt was great was the one level set during some kind of gas leak (the story is not told well at all) and Nittch starts to have these hallucinations and the platforming becomes very… bizarre and quite creative.

I got to the end, watched the credits, and was then greeted by some important-looking bold, yellow text on a back background. Several messages popped up… couldn’t read them because everything was in Spanish, despite me selecting English in the options. Poor localisation?