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They said it couldn't be done but they were wrong! The greatest Amiga demo of them all has been translated onto the Speccy and Amstrad! The game's scenario is pretty straightforward. A strapping young fellah-me-lad has been hideously deformed and enslaved by the Beast Mage, and now it looks like the slave wants revenge on the master!

The player adopts the mantle of the Beast in question and travels through an eight-way scrolling landscape in his quest to bring down the evil Mage and give some his minions a good kicking at the same time. The Beast's quest takes him through many levels of danger and pulse-racing excitement including a haunted forest, a castle full of crazed ghouls and a disused well - with the promise of adventure and terror at every turn!

Let's not beat about the bush - the Amstrad version of Shadow Of The Beast is flippin' good! There's a huge amount of detail crammed into the parallax-scrolling backdrops and the four colour high resolution graphics work really well.

The sprites are big and bold and finely detailed - make no mistake, Shadow Of The Beast is a bit of a looker. As in the Amiga game, the running-about-and-punching-things action is a bit on the simplistic side, but there are a few unambitious puzzle elements to activate the old logic centres every now and again.

Admittedly, it's hard to imagine a better conversion than this, but as a game Shadow Of The Beast is still lacking that extra oomph that would make it a classic. Go get it if you like the looks of the Amiga game.

A monochrome version of the Amstrad game... and just as good.