Barbarian II: The Dungeon Of Drax is the successor of the famous Barbarian fighting game released in 1987 by Palace Software. Dungeon of Drax is an extension of its predecessor, although the gameplay is different, and was released in 1989 for the 16bit Amiga, Atari ST, PC (MS-DOS) and the 8bit BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, Spectrum ZX and Acorn Electron.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The game is a flip-screen action adventure game with hack and slash elements. You choose between a male Barbarian (featured on the first game) who uses a Battle-Axe or a female character who wields a Long Sword. You travel through four different places to find Drax and finish his plans once and for all. On each of the first three levels you must fight six different types of monsters who are willing to kill you faster than you think! Those monsters can be from little angry chickens to heavily powered giants using their...bat! During your quest you can also gain more lives (initially 5) by collecting any skulls you may find. A truly interesting arcade adventure game (rather than a fighting game as its predecessor) which will offer you plenty of gameplay time! You start from a volcanic land and you go through a cave complex, a dungeon and finally three levels in which you encounter 2 monsters guarding Drax, ending up in a final fight with him.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The graphics are colorful, with smooth sprite animations and the sound has no in-game music but is supported with various sampled sound FX, from weapon clangs to monster roars (you can even hear the wind blowing too). The Amiga and ST versions are quite identical, with no major differences except OF the mode analysis. Amiga uses 320x256 and 20 colors on-screen.
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