Death Trap

STORY / GAMEPLAY
An evil man called Shankriya attacked your land and stole 5 magic scrolls that protected your people. These magic scrolls granted great power to Shankriya so he hid them away in a cave complex with numerous dungeons, known as "Death Trap". This complex is a great set of labyrinths swarmed by hordes of deadly minions and fatal traps (like dropping concrete slabs, spikes that pop out from the floor, dead pits with fire and more). Starting out with nothing more than your trusty knife, you have to stab your way through hordes of giant frogs, ghosts and demented Egyptian wizards. Luckily, killing some of these guys you will get a potion that will give you the ability to use magic weapons, spells and healing powers. The adventure element mostly consists of activating switches and exploring complicated mazes but the potions found are the whole game's main key so you must learn to use them wisely. The potion menu can is shown by hitting the spacebar. From there, the potion found can be used to give you a boost by casting a spell. In general, the sprites are fairly small but probably difficult to hit and at the end of each level there's a huge (5 times like the hero) boss awaiting for you! Overall Death Trap is a cool action adventure game and the strategic use of magic adds a lot and refreshes the old platform action game formula. The gameplay is sometimes unfair though (i.e. the spikes pop up from the floor giving no warning before they strike!), but it's intense and will keep you playing for a long time.

GRAPHICS
The Amiga version's graphics are look great and it is obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been taken over them. The sprites are well animated while the backgrounds have some animations too (i.e. fire on mounted torches, pits with moving lava, spikes coming from the floor etc). The game's scrolling is smooth, without any glitches and the backdrops are colorful and pretty much detailed. The Amiga OCS version offers more than 50 colors on-screen and the screen is divided in two parts: the bottom part is the information/status panel which is designed with up to 32 colors, while the top part is the playable area with up to 32 colors at once here (as expected, that's twice the colors of the ST counterpart). Comparably, the ST and Amiga look equally good (in terms of visuals) but the main difference between is the Amiga's flawless framerate (Blitter anyone?)

SOUND
The Amiga's sound here is just basic since is not quite close to the Amiga's standards (except of the introductory music). The Amiga version offers a few nice sampled sound effects that add to the game's spooky atmosphere but there is no in-game music at all, which is rather awkward for an Amiga!