Developer - Psygnosis    Catalogue No. - T-60034

Type - Action

The Shadow of the Beast franchise has always been a bit on the cack side to be honest.  Sure, the first game had some very impressive parallax scrolling which on it's home platform, the Amiga, was out of this world.  Not so amazing on a console mind you but still nice.  Anyway, the first game apart from looking pretty suffered from stiff game play and over the top difficulty levels.  Did the developers learn from their mistakes with the 2nd game?  Err.... not really.

Shadow of the Beast II or Beast II as some people like to call it starts off very promising with it's impressive introduction which continues throughout the game during cut scenes.  However these very nice touches don't make a great game.  Beast II has lost the one thing that made the first game stand out, the multi layer parallax scrolling and has replaced it with bog standard scrolling.  The graphical detail is probably on par with the original mind you but loosing that lovely multi layer parallax really does make the game look dated.  Still, if it plays good we can forgive the lack of visuals.  Unfortunately Beast II plays just as stiff as the original.  Sure, games like this were fine on the Amiga but on a home console they're not.  Console gamers expect to be able to turn and jump at the same time, not turn then jump.  The stiffness of the controls not only make the game uncomfortable to play but also annoyingly hard due to the lack of freedom.

What could have been a great game is ruined by awful controls and dumb difficulty levels mostly caused by poor level design.