Shadow of The Beast 2

STORY / GAMEPLAY
After defeating Maletoth on the first game and gaining back your human nature and body, you return to your homeland Karamoon to lead a peaceful life. But the demonic forces won't just let go of the fact that you killed Maletoth. Zelek, a powerful dragon-looking beast enters your village and kidnaps your baby sister to use her as a "Messenger" replacement for the Beast Lord! This is where your quest begins, to find and bring your sister back and ultimately kill Zelek! On the way, you will be called to fight against more than 100 types of evil minions and monsters that are now out to avenge their master's loss. In each visually stunning level, there are many puzzles for you to solve and proceed further to your final goal and the intense action makes things even harder. SOTB 2 is a good but very difficult -and sometimes frustrating- game. It's particularly hard to finish it since your energy level (presented in a bottle) can easily deplete after taking some hits! Your main weapon is some kind of a chained mace that can kill an enemy from a pretty safe distance since the chain is quite long. This is a positive aspect compared to the first game where you had to engage in full-contact fight (with your fists).

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Besides having inferior visuals to its predecessor (lacking all those colors and high number of multi-parallax scrolling presented in Beast), the game looks quite good. SOTB 2 starts with a wonderful intro, showing the kidnapping of Aabron’s sister (note that the ST version offers soundless scenes at this point!). The in-game graphics are colorful (though dark at times) as well as the backgrounds and the sprite animation is smooth. I’ve noticed, though, that the Reflection developers did not do the best they could in terms of graphics' detail as the color palette they used is not so wide compared to its predecessor and in comparison to the ST version. Note that the first Beast offered up to 128 colors on screen (Amiga version) and now the colors are no more than 40. Comparably, the ST version offers 30-35 colors! The game's sound consists of a melodic stereo music score, composed by Tim Wright plus a few –but essential- sampled sound effects.