Deliverance
| Developer: Devinart | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: 21st Century | Sound: |
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| Year: 1992 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Action-platformer | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
5/10 | |
You’re a big, bearded axe-thrower on a mission to free tiny fairies imprisoned in Satan’s realm. Questions? Me neither.
It’s often compared to Gods, and not without reason, though it’s officially adapted from the game Stormlord 2: Deliverance (ZX Spectrum, 1990). The only similarity I’ve found with its 8-bit cousin is the flimsy excuse for a storyline…
Deliverance features four levels packed with nightmarish creatures, which you’ll hack your way through, axe in hand, bellowing “Gnah! Gnah! Gnah!”
The first level looks blatantly like Gods. Hard to deny the plagiarism. The later levels show a bit more creativity, particularly the third one, set in a haunted forest. But that brief burst of inspiration fizzles out quickly, as the game’s final stretch descends into a dull, formulaic shoot’em up, as it so often does…
Visually, I don’t think it matches Gods, despite the design of its monsters (and bosses). The background elements feel haphazardly scattered, lacking the same cohesive colour palette and polish as the Bitmap Brothers’ classic—just look at the hero’s death animation, for example.
Beyond the visuals, though, there’s honestly not much left to praise. Tossing axes at the same faces for hours on end, with no new weapons to find, no real secrets to uncover—it’s sorely lacking in variety and pace. And let’s not even start on the stiff controls, which, unfortunately, we’ve come to expect.
Oh, and here’s an odd feature: you can drop what seem to be markers on the ground by pressing “F1” to plot your route so you don’t get lost. Yet the simplistic level layouts hardly seem to justify their existence.
Could I trade them in for a shotgun instead?
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