Brian the Lion

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You play the role of a little jungle feline named "Brian the Lion" and your main task is to rescue your dear friend "Chris the Crystal" who was kidnapped by the evil "Geeza the Dragon". You start your quest with a couple of simple abilities like running, jumping, stomping on enemies and slashing. The game contains some really nice touches, especially Brian's roar. This can be used to kill smaller creatures and startle middle-sized creatures. The level design is great, with many obstacles to watch for and secrets to discover. You pretty much always exploring, dodging enemies or collecting some nice bonuses. The game is not dull at all! On the contrary, Brian the Lion is so much fun! The controls are fairly straightforward, though you may often "brainlessly" run towards enemies by accident. This is a classic action platform game that will keep you playing a lot! It's not a unique game but Psygnosis rarely made bad games. Brian the Lion is recommended for any Amiga owner and it's a decent game either on the original OCS chipset or on the most advanced AGA.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are really good and offer some nicely detailed backdrops and landscapes, with parallax scrolling and funny, cartoonish, characters. Note that, the game fakes a parallax layer using a couple of sprites multiplexed across the screen! The Amiga OCS version is pretty colorful, with more than 100 colors on screen and the game's animation is fast and smooth. So, we have a visually very decent game for the OCS Amigas. The main difference between both Amiga versions (the OCS and the AGA) is that the latter shows more details on the backdrops (as it was expected) and more colors on screen (remember Zool?) The sound is also great, featuring 50 amusing in-game tunes and many digitized sound effects.