Welcome to Your Doom! (Sega Altered Beast (Amiga))

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Sega Altered Beast (Amiga)
Date:	07/08/09 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: colourful cartoony graphics, interesting setting, nostalgia value

Disadvantages: Poor gameplay, clunky controls, ropey collision detection, short

Altered Beast is a 2d-scolling fantasy-themed beat-em-up platformer that was originally released as an arcade machine in 1988 and ported to a wide range of platforms including the Amiga and Sega Megadrive soon after. The game opens with some rather ropey digitised speech that says "Rise from your graves!" as your character bursts from a tomb in a cemetery and sets about punching and kicking his way through the levels range of shambling zombies. The graphics are quite basic but not without a certain cartoonish charm, and the Greek mythological setting is an interesting one, whilst the levels and enemies are varied and colourful.

The gameplay is very basic and not particularly exciting, involving scrolling from left to right attacking your enemies with the very small range of kicks and punches at your disposal, whilst looking out for blue hounds who leave behind a blue orb when killed. When collected a cheesy voice says "POWER UP!!" at which point your character's muscles increase in size as they burst through his clothes, Incredible Hulk-style. You can do this a couple of times, with your character ending up looking like a grotesque Mr universe contestant in nothing but a pair of skimpy briefs by the end, and I always found it funny that whilst your character's body increases in size his head remains the same, looking increasingly ridiculous with each power-up collected. With each orb collected your attacks become more powerful, and the final power-up you collect turns you into a different monster on each level, with its own unique modes of attack. The creatures you can turn into include a werewolf, a dragon, and weretiger and a werebear, and this adds a little much-needed variety to the rather dry and unengaging gameplay. At the end of each level you go up against an evil wizard who shouts "Welcome to your doom" in a very slurry, badly-digitised voice, before turning into one of a range of end of level bosses, which include a huge demon who throws his heads at you and a giant slimy tentacle thing that fires groups of its numerous eyes in your direction.

The controls are clunky and unresponsive, and the collision-detection is pretty poor, whilst the game is very short, although the difficulty curve goes up dramatically on the later levels, which I always found rather frustrating. There's nothing much to this game really, and it has very little to hold the interest now. Worth a quick look for the nostalgia value, but is unlikely to hold your attention for very long.

Summary: A poor and rather dated if still charming beat em up