Wrath of the Demon
| Developer: Abstrax | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: ReadySoft | Sound: |
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| Year: 1991 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Action | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
5/10 | |
Dragon’s Lair meets Shadow of the Beast…
A priori, At first glance, we’re falling into the syndrome of the gorgeous but substance-less Amiga game, like Shadow of the Beast, Unreal, or even Dragonstone.
Your good king sends you demon-hunting across the plains. In the first level, you ride a white steed through rocky landscapes that scroll across multiple planes. How beautiful! Yes, but it’s absolute torture to play unless you have mutant-like reflexes. Press “fire” when something flies at your face, “up” to jump over a boulder, “down” to collect a potion… Hey! Doesn’t this remind you of Hugo? You find the same thing in Back to the Future 3, actually. A heads-up for enthusiasts!
The next level takes the form of a basic combat game against a pair of goblins. Once again, too slow to excite the masses. Level 3: dragon slaying (reminds me of him…).
After that, it reverts to demon-bashing copied from Shadow of the Beast—repetitive and sluggish. At least the bosses are magnificent. Though you’d need to really fancy trudging through the long pugilistic sequences in between. We can at least credit the developers with including a save feature.
I could go on, but I confess I stopped playing halfway through and watched the rest on video. The moral of the story: a fantastic atmosphere and parallax scrolling make for a jolly nice demo, but not a good game!
Note that the soundtrack is a rehash of Shadow of the Beast, lazy composer?
For those tempted to play it on an emulator, the secondary disk drives don’t seem to be supported. I tried the CDTV version, but couldn’t configure the keyboard/gamepad controls on WinUAE. You’ll have to resign yourself to juggling with the four or five floppy disks.
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