Shadow of the beast 2 was a visually stunning game, with equally stunning sound. The game-play however was, let’s say “challenging”. The game was a platform style layout with left right scrolling action, the usual thing. It was very easy to die and to be fair the puzzles were far too hard for the average aged Amiga user of the day. Revisiting the game now is therefore worth the download. There is an amazing re-birth scene after you die with a sampled guitar and keyboard synth track which was so awe inspiring that it was years ahead of it’s time and convinced many people to buy an Amiga based solely on that alone.
Shadow of the beast 2 was a visually stunning game, with equally stunning sound. The game-play however was, let’s say “challenging”. The game was a platform style layout with left right scrolling action, the usual thing. It was very easy to die and to be fair the puzzles were far too hard for the average aged Amiga user of the day. Revisiting the game now is therefore worth the download. There is an amazing re-birth scene after you die with a sampled guitar and keyboard synth track which was so awe inspiring that it was years ahead of it’s time and convinced many people to buy an Amiga based solely on that alone.
The game writers had little or no regard for the
player and this game is unique in the fact that remains fixed in the heads of every Amiga owner of the day despite being unplayable. There are none of the usual safeguards in place in to prevent you advancing in the game without the necessary equipment to complete the tasks that would lie ahead, leaving you to seemingly roam endlessly throughout the world looking for elusive artifacts. The puzzles were horrendously difficult and pointlessly punishing that if executed wrongly could not be reset and would more than likely ‘kill’ your player which obviously meant starting from scratch. There was no ‘3lives’ system as is familiar with computer games, just a health vial which when empty means game over.
A truly amazing achievement by the developers, it’s very rare do games get remembered so clearly for everything but their game-play! There were 2 other games on the franchise, a prequel and a sequel, but this is the only one that really sticks out in my mind.
