Wrath of the Demon Longplay (Amiga) [50 FPS]

Developed by Abstrax and published by ReadySoft in 1991

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When Reflections released Shadow of the Beast on the Commodore Amiga in 1989, a lot of people sat up and took notice. Despite some terribly irksome gameplay and bad design, the game remains one of the most memorable because of it's sheer technical brilliance.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so Reflections must have been immensely proud when Abstrax released Wrath of the Demon, a game that bears more than a passing resemblance to Reflections' game. Heavily influenced by this and other side-scrolling adventure games, Abstrax clearly wanted to raise the bar even further by producing a game that looked, sounded and played better than SOTB.

The game is absolutely gorgeous to look at and has some of the best looking visuals the Amiga has to offer. The developers also included multiple levels of parallax scrolling and super-smooth scrolling that's easily as good as Reflections' earlier game.

So intent must have Abstrax been to make their game bigger and better than Shadow of the Beast, that they even got David Whittaker to do the soundtrack, even down to using the same pan-pipe samples! I don't think the music is quite as iconic, but it's still incredibly atmospheric and is a great fit with the overall theme of the game.

Whilst it's fair to say that game excels in terms of presentation, the actual gameplay is quite a serious letdown. Adhering too rigidly to the template laid down by Shadow of the Beast, this game not only makes many of the same mistakes that it's predecessor did, but is even more tiresome thanks to it's over-reliance on obstacle avoidance and requiring the player to have split-second reactions.

The side-scrolling 'adventure' sections rely almost exclusively on hitting monsters as they appear from either side of the screen, or jumping over barrels and other obstacles. I'm not sure if it's just me, but I simply don't have fast enough reactions to deal with most of the foes without prior knowledge of their placement within the level, which made the whole game tremendously frustrating.

The boss fights fluctuate wildly in their difficulty also, with some being ridiculously easy to defeat (swamp-man), whilst others will smack you around with impunity and are a real headache. I really had to laugh at the fact that the titular Demon and final boss in the game appears to be stuck inside a massive hole and can only shoot fireballs at you - his predicament explains why he has been summoning creatures to do to take over the kingdom as he can't get himself unwedged to do it himself.

I also found myself asking a host of other questions whilst playing, such as why is the hero completely bare-chested - not only must he be freezing, but it's not exactly a good idea to go fighting hordes of murderous demons without any armour.

As a technical showcase, Wrath of the Demon is brilliant. As a game, however, the difficulty means that it's not much fun to play at all. I've played many frustrating games, but only the most most difficult make me curse out loud, and this made me curse enough to make a sailor blush!

Now that I've beaten it, I'm off for a lie down...
#retrogaming