Reviews

Shadow of the Beast is a spectacular program and I wonder why nobody has reviewed it yet .

The graphics are the best thing ever seen on a Speccy ,,, you feel like watching a fantasy film .

The baddies are terrifying , because of their looks and dimensions , and because of their behaviour and intentions ,,, really scary , really menacing .

The atmosphere of the game is supreme ... the scenarios are very suggestive , like a wild dream .

Shadow of the Beast is the definitive game .

Shadow of the Beast wowed gamers when it first appeared. With it's jaw dropping graphics it really showcased the capabilities of the Amiga. It was really more of a tech demo than an actual game so it was perhaps surprising that it was ported to the humble spectrum.
Without the Amiga's fancy graphics however, the shallow gameplay is even more apparent. The game has huge areas with not a lot in them or you may come across a load of ants whereby you walk 2 steps crouch and punch then walk 2 steps crouch and punch until you fall into a coma. Making any sort of progress is extremely slow and tedious, made worse by the horrible multiload when you reach a new area.

I first played Beast on the Amiga, sure the aesthetics carry it to a certain degree but I like it and I don't think it is quite as shallow as a lot of people claim.

Anyway, I fired it up on the plus3 the other night and found myself enjoying it just as the original, and similarly got my butt kicked in the castle. Obviously everything had to be scaled down considerably but the results are admirable, the scrolling is still smoother than a lot of ST games and the level of detail is adequate to convey the trademark atmosphere albeit accompanied by some rather funky colour schemes. Actually I think after conversion the backdrops in particular are somewhat evocative of Baal, an earlier Psygnosis game from a different team. Whittaker's score is good as expected but I still couldn't resist listening to the original mods on WinAMP while playing.

Maybe Beast doesn't have the universal appeal of Pacman but the heady mix of exploration, simple puzzles and twitch reflex action works fairly well and is carried off by the unique art direction. If you ever thought on going through Beast on all formats, why not start with the Spectrum?

The idea to convert the Amiga favourite onto the Spectrum was ambitious but the end result is largely ineffective. This was supposed to achieve the goal of having an epic adventure on your Spectrum yet all it achieved was showing how limited the Spectrum's capabilities were, with its largely monochrome graphics and its two cassette bullshit multiload. The game itself is alright, mostly repetitive though with constantly beating up ants and walking right endlessly until you reach a door, which then tells you to load side 4, then you realise you can't do anything because it's too dark so you have to go back, which loads side 3 again. I'm thankful I never bought this back in the day because it would have been a pain in the arse to load and run. It's not a bad game, but stick to the 16-bit versions I think.

Oh jeez! one of the crappiest most overrated graphical wankfests from the Amiga finds it's way onto a machine it has no real business being on.

I hate this game, absolutely hate it, in pretty much all forms. The game is a frustrating mess with next to no gameplay at all.

The Speccy version is pretty much devoid of the soundtrack, which is the one redeeming feature from the Amiga version, that wasn't outdated on release. Nice graphics do not make a game, and the original "Beast" is a prime example of this.

I'm however giving the Speccy version a 2 instead of a 1, as they managed to faithfully convert "The Beast" in it's entire shitness to a machine that supposedly couldn't do it. It's still a fucking pile of complete and utter shit, but it's here in glorious yellow monochrome (and a few different colours later on I suppose) for the whole world to be unimpressed with all over again. It's also multi-load hell, best use an emulator to play it if you feel inclined to waste your life doing so.

Such effort to convert a massive shit, I feel the programmers skills could have been used to convert a much better game. I'm not knocking the people that did convert this, they did a great job, of converting this mediocre pile of wank as best they could.

It's not the programmers fault if the source material is a seeping yeast infected gash waiting to be sterilised with a victorian steam iron....


Great conversion of a terrible game, not the programmers fault at all! They did the best they could with what they had.

Sadly enough the remake of Shadow of the Beast on Playstation....actually softened me towards the series. It's not an amazing game, but it made me hate the entire series slightly less, as it's actually fun for a little while. Who would've thought after all these years a game based on the license that plays and looks pretty much nothing like the original might be good....Oh hang on...