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The temple Necropolis casts a horrific shadow across its alien world. The courtyard is regularly sluiced with blood from the mass slaughter of humans at its sacrificial stone. One of the participants in the Beast Lord's appalling blood-letting is the warrior-messenger, a goat-headed creature.

Yet once he was an innocent child, abducted by the Beast Lord and turned into a monster by his mages. For many years, he has served the Beast Lord selflessly, but now his own parents have gone to the stone, stirring long suppressed memories...

You are the goat-warrior and your quest is bloody vengeance. You start on an empty plain with the Beast Lord's airships floating overhead. To the left there's a tree with a doorway to take you down into a cavern, a labyrinth of platforms, ladders and all sorts of monsters. Also here are some keys, which might be useful for the labyrinthine castle to the right.

You start off with twelve lives which can very easily be lost. As you explore, more lives can be found, along with "don't touch" levers, a laser gun and a jetpack. Some weapons, such as an electrical bolt last only a set time and must be used on the right monster if you're to progress. Get far enough and you'll find potions which restore all your lives, but it's no easy task to find them.

"The ultimate in entertainment software" turns out to be a large, but not massive, arcade adventure which mainly consists of timing your punches against masses of enemies.

A very high level of difficulty substitutes for any real depth. At first, this causes frustration, but after playing the game for quite a while, it began to grow on me.

A real sense of achievement comes from completing a section, and with five huge zones and a total of 350 screens, completing the game is an immense challenge.

Although not quite the mega-game expected, Beast is beautifully presented and extremely playable.

In one way the £35 price tag is almost justified, the game is so tough and long-winded you need that price to force you back. Play Beast well enough and it rewards you with new opponents, but starting again takes 90 seconds with disk access and compulsory intro tune. And it's a long fight back to where you were!

Gameplay is no great advance on 8-bit arcade-adventures: run about, punch baddies, work out enemy attack patterns and collect the goodies. But the 350 screen map is 16-bit size, as is presentation with a superb soundtrack and brilliant backgrounds.

The parallax scrolling above ground is great, but some of the monsters are mediocre. Initially the price and difficulty make Beast disappointing, but persistence reveals an above average game, if not a mega one.

Presentation 88%
Free T-shirt, good loading screen and plot details during frequent disk access. Wait when you die maddening.

Graphics 92%
Excellent backgrounds, but many of the 132 monsters are blandly coloured and animated.

Sound 97%
Superlative pipe-like David Whittaker soundtracks which vary according to situation.

Hookability 74%
Amazing graphics draw you in, but tough gameplay and lengthy disk accessing put you off.

Lastability 88%
A big challenge, more due to tough opponents and no save option than size, but may prove too frustrating for some.

Overall 83%
Very nice to look at, very tough to play and *very* expensive!