Antstream Arcade Review (PS5) | Push Square

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Retro gaming is big business these days. Products like the Evercade have proven there’s a market for a curated collection of physical cartridge-based compilations, while various Chinese manufacturers are making a fortune on Android-powered emulation portables. Even Sony has acknowledged there’s value in its back catalogue, offering handpicked emulated experiences as part of its pricey PS Plus Premium subscription tier.

Antstream Arcade is aware of all this, and it has a relatively compelling pitch: expand your PS5 or PS4 library with over 1,300 classics on-demand right now. The service offers two subscription tiers: 12 months for £32.99/$39.99 or a lifetime membership for £79.99/$99.99. It should be stressed that the lifetime membership will only last as long as the company itself, and while that’s a somewhat cynical observation, it needs to be taken into account.

That’s because the service relies on cloud streaming, so you don’t download any of these titles natively. The benefits to this are as follows: every game can be accessed immediately, and your progress can be stored on servers. The negatives are well-documented: you’ll need a decent Internet connection, and even then, you’re still going to encounter latency which wouldn’t exist if the software was running locally on your system.

Indeed, your mileage will absolutely vary depending on the speed of your connection, the quality of your router, and whether you have your console hooked up wirelessly or with an Ethernet cable. While there are a number of options to pick from, it’ll also depend on your proximity from the servers; we have a very average connection here in the middle of the UK, and found the latency to be manageable wirelessly, but we did encounter some macroblocking and visual glitches.

In our opinion, all of the games we tested were fully playable, including those which demand quick reflexes, like bullet hell shooters. But there’s simply no question these titles would look and perform better runnin