REVIEW | Antstream Arcade

I was instantly excited when Antstream Arcade was announced for the Xbox platform. This is the first third-party cloud streaming game library on the Xbox platform. It comes with a wooping 1400+ retro game list. In other words, literally a retro enthusiasts dream. The costs are pretty interesting too, €30 for a 1-year subscription or €80 for a lifetime subscription. The only catch? You play the games through the cloud. Considering the service only covers retro games it works more reliable than Microsoft’s cloudgaming. It allows you to play a few SNES games on Xbox, who ever thought that would happen? (technically Rare Replay too)

Game name: Antstream Arcade
Publisher: Antstream Ltd
Developer: Antstream Ltd

I won’t be going over all the games, I will mention a few favorites of mine but you can find the game library on their official website. It was a trip down memory lane to browse through the game list, seeing games from the Atari Lynx, 2600, 7800, Game Boy, SNES and others. I was more interested in the arcade games as it has Colony 7, Double Dragon and many games in the Shmup genre. I’m not the biggest retro gamer but having such a large collection of older games available with only a few button inputs feels a bit magical. I would call Antstream Arcade essential for all gamers, not only retrolovers. Video game preservation is an important thing, it is something that Xbox as a platform knowns too. For that reason alone Antstream is fantastic.

Antstream Arcade itself is a small download on your Xbox, it is basically an app like Netflix or Crunchyroll. It showcases the library and features a powerful search engine. You simply select one of the available games, and a few seconds later you are playing the game. While the game is getting ready it shows you the controls. I was honestly very positively surprised about the game performance. Microsoft’s Xbox Cloudgaming works decent enough but the scale of current-gen games cause it to struggle a bit. This is not the case while using the service from Antstream, 99% of the time it was like playing the game locally. The only thing I noticed with a few games is the downgrade in visuals. It is hard to explain but sometimes games get this blocky visual filter, luckily it doesn’t happen often.

What makes this really special is the competitive nature of the service. Games have high scores and are saved globally. You will get a notification when a friend beats your best score. While this feature might mean nothing for you… for me personally it was a big reason to replay games and beat my friend(s). They call it multiplayer challenges and change every month. You have other social features like tournaments, community challenges and duel notifications. But what is more social than inviting over a friend and playing some games locally in classic couch co-op? That’s possible too, if the game supports it.