Yeah, it was hugely impressive at the time due to the quality of the graphics, which had not been seen in that form before on most home machines. But as a game, meh. Someone at that studio, the art director or else some principal artist, really did have superior design skills, though.
agreed. it was not the most fun to play, but on my amiga it looked streets ahead of anything else. I’ll have to give it another whirl purely out of nostalgia.
I loved looking at this game.
It appears damaged and you should put it in the trash…
I had access to Amigas at school. So sad that computer went away. The graphics were just awesome for the time.
You take that back! It never went away!
I only actually played it for about half an hour back in the day, but my recollection was that Shadow of the Beast made for gorgeous screenshots and played like a slideshow. The pixel work was astounding, but it felt like enemies had at most four frames of animation apiece. There were no death animations, you just punched dudes and they went rigid and fell off the screen. I remember a lot of huge, intricate, screen-filling bosses with no animation whatsoever, belligerent matte paintings that slid back and forth a bit and occasionally emitted a bullet.
My impression is that this was a pretty common pattern for Amiga games in particular. At a guess: when it was released the Amiga’s graphical capabilities were shockingly ahead of its time, but its storage and memory–floppies and RAM–were nothing unusual. You could make gorgeous pictures (and the pixel masters bred in the early demo scenes were quite ready to), but you couldn’t have a lot of them in the same game.
Compare the other game Psygnosis is famous for, Lemmings, which combined sumptuous, non-interactive SotB-type backgrounds with gorgeously animated but tiny characters.
Ten pints.
Every school had a kid who claimed he could beat it without 'em, too.
It wasn’t just the OS that made it awesome - which as a great mix of DOS/GUI - but the hardware. I did some early 3D animation in a program called Imagine. IIRC Babylon 5 was rendered on Amigas. Part of me wishes I had stuck with trying to do 3D stuff, but I just couldn’t find a program for it around where I was. In hindsight maybe it was a good call. I don’t know if I’d ever had been good enough to be like a lead animator. I’d probably be stuck in a cube making coffee cups and other mundane crap.
If we’d had #gamergate back then, perhaps we’d have had journos who would have been prepared to say that SotB2 and Kick Off 2 were, in fact, shit. 
Side note: the Kickstarter for an updated version of Cinemaware’s Wings is due to release this week.
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