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 (our hero's) father and casts a spell to transform the young boy 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, gaining back his human nature. On his task, he must fight armed enemies, bloodthirsty monsters, magician lords, skeletons, avoid traps and finally confront the menacing Maletoth. The journey is hard and Aabron needs ample energy in order to survive. His only weapons are his bare hands plus some rare tools that he can use on the way. In terms of gameplay, Shadow of the Beast is one of the most difficult games ever created for the Amiga so it takes patience and some good skills to survive. The whole action is pretty fast and the enemies are fiercely attacking to kill Aabron. But, apart from the enemy hordes there are also deadly traps, maze-like stages (etc the underground ones) and gigantic level bosses.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ZX Spectrum version is almost identical to the Amstrad CPC with the latter having just a few more colors. Comparably, both versions cannot match the C64 counterpart (in terms of scrolling, animation and sound) but still, the game looks good on the ZX. In terms of details, this version resembles the original as much as possible, having nicely drawn sprites and backgrounds. Beast also has three levels of parallax scrolling (!) which is quite impressive for the ZX hardware. Collision detection is great and the sprites move quite fast. Soundwise the game is similar to the CPC and includes most of the original tunes (limited to the ZX sound hardware) whilst there are several sound effects during gameplay. Overall the game on the ZX is surprisingly quite good.