Pegasus

STORY / GAMEPLAY
After many years of fierce battling, the five planes of existence were invaded and made corrupt by Satan. He wasted no time in filling them with his own creatures, foul abominations of nature. It seemed that nothing would be able to ever regain and save the ancient worlds. Satan has decided for something cataclysmic. Travelling the five planes of existence ha has shattered the magical crystals which hold the souls of Death, Nature, War and Fate. Without them to keep the forces of magic in balance chaos will take over the mortal world. Terrible catastrophes will bring normal life to a stop. Earthquakes will destroy cities, floods will kill millions. However, there is a brave hero, named Perseus who can save the world. Flying on the back of his faithful companion, Pegasus, he takes to the skies killing the creatures of the night. The game is set over five levels, one for each of the crystals and a final level in...Hell. Each level is further split into ten stages. The first five are the flying sequences with your pal Pegasus, while the second five are sightly different, in which you dismount Pegasus to explore on foot. You run, jump and fight your way across the land. Creatures attack from the air and land. They come in varying sizes and powers and some take more shots to eliminate the others. The smaller minions can be dealt with easily, just a couple of daggers will do the job. The larger man eating creatures require a lengthy bout of blasting with spears and crossbows. At the end of each level is a Guardian. These are larger and harder to kill. Of course there are several bonus to collect in form of crystals, to either restore your health or upgrade your sword's fire balls (oh yes, your sword in the flying section, shoot fireballs). Some crystals will be found, some waiting to be collected, others only appearing after enemies have been destroyed.In the flying sections, crystals are used to increase the power of your weaponry while in the running sections crystals will increase the power of your sword as well as restore your health. Also in the running section, by collecting 30 crystals will also give you a special magical sword that will launch a fireball in front of you, killing any enemy it hits before they have a chance to reach you.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are quite nice although a bit blocky, and obviously had a lot of work put into them with plenty of neat touches and truly beautiful backdrops with up to 64 on screen for the Amiga (utilizing the EHB palette mode), lighting flashes, bucket load of parallax scrolling and some truly incredible animation on Pegasus himself. As the levels progress, the background graphics become more and more dazzling, right to the swirling flames of Hell. The animation on Pegasus, the multi-level parallax scrolling and the gameplay are all brilliant on the flying section. However, when you dismount things are a little tedious (that is the running sections), it does not offer something special, rather than the great Perseus animation and a few rocky-style details in the foreground. The Amiga version offers way better graphics here when compared to the Atari ST version in which most of the background details are missing, parallax-scrolling is missing and so on.
The introductory sequence is pretty nice too, as well as the loading screen which offers more than 1900 colors running in HAM mode here.
The sound on the Amiga version is quite good and well suited to the game, as digitized thunder punctuates the explosions and zap effects and adds up to the pretty impressive introduction to the game accompanied with a pleasant piece of music. I would expect at least a background tune during gameplay though, as the in-game sound is restricted to sound effects, although these are of a good standard.