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. Note that the Megadrive version is identically tough to play as the Amiga version; besides, Shadow of the Beast is one of the most difficult games ever created for any gaming platform.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Megadrive version features some nice parallax scrolling, large sprites, more than 80 colors on screen and quite smooth animation at 50 frames per second. Nevertheless, I think that the Amiga version still looks better, though it's an older hardware with less powerful specs. The Megadrive's tunes are good but again inferior to the Amiga music and this stands real for the sound FX as well.

OVERALL
This Beast version is a beautiful game for the Sega Megadrive and I guess it's better compared to the SNES. But both versions (actually any other version or port) cannot in any way compare to the much superior and flawless Amiga game Psygnosis developed back in 1989. So, at least in this game, Amiga is King!