Risky Woods is an action platform game, initially created for the Atari ST, Amiga and PC (MS-DOS) in 1992 and later that year a Megadrive port followed. A typical action adventure in which all you need to do is move left to right, jumping over platforms, killing beasties and rescuing monks. A typical gameplay but with good visuals and sound.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY
The hero of the game is Rohan, a young man who tries to save some deities that were put prisoners inside some stones (!) Rohan's enemies are numerous ancient warriors and skeletons who try to prevent him from saving the gods, so his quest is quite hard. Rohan must also face a more dangerous enemy; the potential fall from a platform which will instantly kill him and will decrease the total coins he gathers. Rohan's weaponry is limited to knives, boomerangs and a few other throwing weapons. Remember to throw your projectiles quickly towards the enemies since they sometimes attack in groups! Each time an enemy is downed it drops one or more coins. These coins (existing only in the Sega Megadrive version) are used to increase your armor's strength (rather than paying at shops and upgrade your weaponry as in the Amiga, ST and PC versions.)
GRAPHICS / SOUND Technically the Amiga version is good with nice graphics, backgrounds and way more detail compared to the ST. In some cases it's a better version compared to the MS-DOS! The game on the Amiga has a multi-colored background. The entire background layer is created using sprites and the background pattern repeats every 64 pixels which is done using four 16-color sprites and redrawing them horizontally across each line! The scrolling is smooth and the sprites move faster than any other version. Soundwise, the Amiga version has a remarkable intro tune along with several sampled sound effects but, surprisingly, no music at the same time (you can choose either sound effects or music on the options)!
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs