Altered Beast

It is a time of gods and myths and legends. When men were warriors and courageously fought unnatural enemies in the endless battle of good against evil. It is the time of Altered Beast.

What can I say? Altered Beast holds some good old fashioned memories for me. Not because I ever really played it as a child as I grew up with a Nintendo but because Altered beast was one of the first Mega Drive games and would always be the sample playable game in the toy stores. Looking at Altered Beast as a child this game looked like the shit. Transforming into different characters and monsters was sick!

Playing this game for my review the first thing I notice is how easy the bad guys are, that is until I encountered the second boss. I seriously tried to beat the boss twenty times before I gave up because I thought the bastard was unbeatable. No matter what I did I could not beat this evil eyeball plant thing. Luckily I found an awesome walk-through which told me how to beat the fucker. Funnily enough, once you know the secret spot he/she is unbelievably easy to defeat. The rest of the bosses after that are pretty straight forward and didn't really require any further research into beating them. Overall the minor enemies are a joke. They are unbelievably easy and the only real way to get killed by them is by becoming impatient. That is until you reach the final stage where all of a sudden the minor bosses are actually reasonably difficult until you manage to power up. The final bosses are all pretty cool monsters and are what you want to see when playing this type of game. They make it worthwhile to keep pushing forward to see what the next boss looks like.

Click Here For The Walkthrough!

What makes this game awesome is the power-ups  You begin as a small human character but as you progress through the level you collect power-ups to strengthen yourself. The first power up increases your size a little bit and improves your attack range. The second power-up increases your size to Hulk like proportions and finally the power-up you have all been waiting for… the third power-up turns you into a beast! When you enter beast mode you get different kinds of attacks that vary depending on the beast you become. These attacks are pretty deadly and the minor bosses may as well go home after that. The fact that in each stage you transform into a different beast again pushes you forward to keep playing this game to see who you become next and what attacks you have. The transformation screen is a classic bit of video game history. There is nothing better than seeing your character morph into a beast. That said the major thing that pisses me off with this game is the fact that when you collect a power-up you stand frozen for a short period of time while you transform into your next phase which then leaves you wide open to get killed. This happens countless of times as you think you are going to miss the power-up and jump head first into danger only to collect the power-up and be frozen while the enemy smacks you around a bit. In order to face the level bosses you need to collect at least three power-ups. If you miss a power-up – which are usually found by killing the grey wolves – the level extends for another segment until you get all three.

The controls are satisfactory and I haven’t got many complaints regarding them. The jump works well as does the high jump. The kick and the punch are okay but both pretty much do the same damage and have the same reach so I generally only use the kick button until I transform.

The graphics are fairly standard. I was not expecting much and the game delivered exactly that. The stage graphics seem to get a bit stagnant and bland after a while but thankfully if you collect the power-ups quickly you are fighting the boss in no time.

The music is pretty average. It’s fairly slow and doesn't really get you in the mood to kick any sort of serious ass. It gets to the point where you can’t tell if the music changes in each stage or whether it’s the same bland tune playing constantly. The music does change however when you transform into the beast and when you fight the final stage bosses.

There is some form of story-line going on but to be honest I didn't really bother following it, standard video game stuff. Bad guy takes the girl and you have to rescue her. The final scene sees you win back the hottie and hints at some kind of beastiality scenes that may have been cut out from the final release!

All in all you could probably finish this game in under twenty minutes if you know what you’re doing. I did enjoy playing it and was happy that after all these years that I finally finished it. I will however note that there is no way I could finish it without changing some of the options. To find the option screen you have to hold down B and press start at the main screen. I found this out by looking for some cheats on Google. Changing the options is highly recommended as I don’t think you would stand much of a chance otherwise. So again, overall this is a reasonably enjoyable game but is a little bit basic and monotonous after a while.

Graphics 14/25 | Soundtrack 10/25 | Game Play 18/25 | Controls 18/25

+1 - Classic Game
+1 Awesome Morph Sequence

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Overall 62/100 – C

The animation above and more awesome Altered Beast artwork can be found here.