Shadow Of The Beast

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Shadow of the Beast takes place in a fantasy world where an Evil Lord called Maletoth kills Aabron's (the hero's) father and then casts a spell to the youngster turning him into a wild, strong and ugly beast (Aabron actually looks much like the ancient Greek god, Pan). Now Aabron must avenge his father's death and break the curse to gain back his human nature. He must fight against large enemies, monsters, magician lords, skeletons, avoid traps and, finally, confront the powerful Maletoth himself. The journey is dangerous and Aabron needs each and every drop of his energy in order to survive. His only weapons are his bare hands plus some rare tools that he can use on the way. Shadow of the Beast is one of the most difficult games ever created in any platform and this particular SNES version is the most frustrating among all!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The SNES version features multi-parallax scrolling, large sprites, more than 100 colors on screen and smooth animation at 50 FPS. But, I think the SNES graphics are inferior to both Megadrive and Amiga(!) The sound FX are also somewhat worse compared to the Amiga and the music score is modified (to the worse...again!). Quite odd for a machine that is technically superior to almost all the 16bits counterparts.

OVERALL
As I already said above, the SNES is surely more powerful than the Amiga OCS but this Beast version cannot compare either to the slightly better Sega Megadrive, which is strange if we consider that the developes had the hardware to make a way better SOTB on the Nintendo's console (as other devs did in many multi-platform games).