Reviews

Not a good arcade conversion at all. While playable the game is ruined by a dreadful colour scheme which make the game flooded with colour clash. Colour clash is commonplace in the Speccy, but to play a game such as Altered Beast, we have to see what we are doing and all I can see is colours scattered all over the place, looks more like an abstract painting than an arcade conversion.

If only for that, Altered Beast may have been a massive hit. If you loved the game in the arcades you may want to give this a go, but I can't promise you happiness.

As a conversion from the Sega coin-op, Altered Beast is good - almost everything you would expect if you played the original is there, down to the intro/attract mode. Trouble is, the graphics are a bit messy, almost on the edge of psychedelia, so the Spectrum version could not suit to everybody's tastes.

Besides, the coin-op itself was, excluding the metamorphosis trick, relatively straightforward, so the game overall gets a 3 for being a competent conversion, but not a really exciting game in itself.

Poor conversion of a classic game .

It reminds me of my teenage years .

Poor graphics and choppy gameplay ruin what could have been a promising arcade conversion.

This could have been a massive hit for Activision, but the poor graphic design and flawed gameplay ruin this port. Not only does it look bad it also plays bad too. A very disappointing arcade conversion.

I finally found my password for this thing!

Altered Beast for me was very overrated and the Spectrum port does nothing to convince me overwise. This port is a mess and that has nothing to do with the graphics which I think are actually quite good, it's the dreadful gameplay that gets to me. First of all your player is slow doing his moves so by the time you've hit the enemies you've lost half your health. Also, he only seems to punch when you are crouched or jumping, not while your standing which you only do kicks (unless I'm missing something) which therefore means this is a pretty inaccurate port. And when you are hit you just stand there rather than back off, even when you lost a life, this means that when you are constantly hit by enemies you can lose two lives quickly without knowing it.

Despite the graphics and music being quite good there are a lot of flaws with Altered Beast's gameplay which destroys its chances of being decent. As my brother Jordy stated in his review, this could have been a massive hit for Activision, but instead it's a poor conversion of an already overrated arcade game that is even more unplayable and unenjoyable.

A multicoloured mess with jerky scrolling.
2,5/5

The Arcade and Mega Drive versions were at least decent but a lot of ports left a lot to be desired, this being one of them. Will give credit for one thing though, the music was amazing, but everything else was poor.

typical late 80's "blockbuster" for 128K










It is fairly entertaining, not bad at all but it lacks the charm of the great classics
...
It doesn't deserve such low marks either