Barbarian II

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game is a flip-screen action adventure game with hack and slash elements. You choose between a male Barbarian (featured on the first game) who uses a Battle-Axe or a female character who wields a Long Sword. You travel through four different places to find Drax and finish his plans once and for all. On each of the first three levels you must fight six different types of monsters who are willing to kill you faster than you think! Those monsters can be from little angry chickens to heavily powered giants using their...bat! During your quest you can also gain more lives (initially 5) by collecting any skulls you may find. A truly interesting arcade adventure game (rather than a fighting game as its predecessor) which will offer you plenty of gameplay time! You start from a volcanic land and you go through a cave complex, a dungeon and finally three levels in which you encounter 2 monsters guarding Drax, ending up in a final fight with him.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics are colorful and support EGA graphics on the MS-DOS (that is, 16-colors on screen), with good sprite animation. The color palette is a bit different from the Amiga and Atari ST versions, due to the different RGB values of the EGA graphics, but it still looks quite good (I liked the character design which looks better to me than the on the Amiga and ST). Also, the game can be played in 4-color CGA (see sample below), 16-color Tandy and monochrome modes. The sound has no in-game music but a variety of sound FX is included, from weapon clangs to monster roars (not sampled though as on the ST and Amiga). Note that the Amiga and ST versions are quite identical, with no major differences except of the pixel analysis and also a few more colors on-screen for the Amiga (20 in total).