Prehistorik II

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Like in its predecessor, the main character of Prehistorik 2 is a caveman who sets off in finding food. On his way, he has to confront a variety of prehistoric animals, other people and some humorous end-level bosses. Prehistorik 2 is cool and keeps all the nice ingredients that make a very fun game to play. Our hero walks and jumps his way through some dangerous territories like rocks, mountains, caves full of trap doors, moving floors, deadly spikes, and whacks enemies in the head with his wooden club. Points can be collected by both whacking enemies and collecting items (including food, diamonds etc). Each level contains some hidden food items that can be discovered by hitting the right spots with your club. The difficulty level increases gradually, which means that you'll have the chance to master the game's controls.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Graphics clearly show a 16bit based cross development origin, making one of the most advanced in graphics games for the original CPC hardware (in the 6128 version)! The game uses rupture technique to split the screen into a scrolling section and a section with a panel. There is a variety of settings, which is based in a rocky kind of place, through jungles, and ice ages, with a few nice animated touches at the background such as bushes moving due to wind. Note that the CPC+ version offers extra colors and visual effects due to its advanced color palette and hardware scrolling capabilities, such as full parallax scrolling at the background and foreground with, more detail such as palm trees, rocky obstacles, nice skylines with moving clouds etc. Sprites are nicely drawn and big in size, with absolutely no flicker as they move quickly and smoothly around the screen. Screen scrolling suffers at times in the CPC version, but in general it moves effortlessly about, keeping up with our hero.
Sound and music are similarly effective. Sound noises all blend nicely together and well matched to the game's atmosphere, while the in-game tune is a little less impressive though pretty nicely composed (although a bit repetitive). The introductory theme, accompanied with the title screen that uses 32KB mode overscan and full 16 colors here, is great though!