Shadow of the Beast 2 offers everything the last game had except this time the playing area is even bigger and the puzzles are so difficult you will need to find an FAQ for help. But don’t take that as a bad point because if you haven’t played the previous title (which I hope you all have), the whole point of the Shadow of the Beast series is to have ridiculous puzzles, it’s a part of the game’s charm (not that a game this eerie and serious has a lot of charm).

The story continues straight from the last game. As a reward for destroying the Beast Lord your human body has been restored leaving you almost naked with nothing to defend yourself with other than a mace. But of course the Beast Lord’s minions aren’t going to just let you off with a warning; the Beast Mage decides to kidnap your baby sister with intentions of altering her body and mind the same way the Beast Lord changed yours. It is up to you to rescue your sister and destroy the Beast Mage putting the final stamp on your revenge.

The game plays very similar to the last game except this time around you have an inventory which can store up to four items for you to select and use whenever you want. Collect anymore and you’ll have to exchange it for an item already in your inventory. Instead of punching and kicking your enemies you have to use a mace in order to defend yourself in your weakened state. As far as improvements go, that is pretty much everything. It doesn’t sound like a lot but it does definitely give the game a new style of strategic gameplay you didn’t have in the previous title. All in all, the game is very simple to play with some interesting twists when it comes to solving puzzles.

On the graphics side of things, fans of the first game will be unhappy to see the loss of the beautiful parallax scrolling backgrounds. It’s always the case with games that the bigger they get, they end up losing something else. But even though it’s a shame to see that detail go it does give Shadow of the Beast 2 its own style and look. The character sprite for this game is a lot bigger and is animated very well making it one of the biggest and most detailed sprites I’ve ever seen in any game. The backgrounds/levels don’t seem to vary as much as the previous title, making this game seem even bigger as you trek through endless amounts of seemingly repeated scenery. The other major loss in the Mega Drive version is the subtraction of the fantastic animated opening sequence which really set the mood for the title in its own spooky and unsettling way. I’d like to put this down to the Mega Drive not being as powerful but look at ‘Rise of the Robots’; that game has an amazingly well animated opening sequence!

Overall, Shadow of the Beast 2 is not the follow up we all expected. It may have lost a few things during the conversion or purely because of the game’s size but none-the-less, this is still a brilliant title which is actually a lot more playable than the previous game with some interesting new twists and puzzles.