BATTLE BEAST
Original Release: 7th Level, 1995, PC
Other Releases: Macintosh (1996)
An odd fighting game from a developer that had never done anything like this before, Battle Beast shines in terms of art but clunks along in terms of gameplay
Battle Beast (PC, 7th Level, 1995)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: MS-DOS Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
In a concept that probably isn't too far off in the real world, toys that are meant to be a combination of pet and home security become a big problem when a budget Dr. Wily knockoff with a fetish for toads steals a bunch and tries to make a personal army out of them. Pick one of six of these Battle Beast models, and you'll repetitively cruise between different locations using the city's sewer system to repetitively fight the others (often fighting the same one multiple times in a row) until you finally come across the evil mastermind and lay the smackdown upon him.
7th Level, probably best known for the 90s Monty Python games and the PC version of Tamagotchi, really did it big with the cartoon-style art done in the classic manner of drawing individual cels. At least visually, this helped it to age better than the typical Windows 3.1 game; unfortunately gameplay is an entirely different story.
I feel like a Battle Beast toy line would have done well with 90s kids if this had ever made it to the mainstream, they have that cool animal-robot-Transformer thing going in the manner of the Dinobots and such (and IIRC Beast Wars came out and was a hit like a year after this). But the reason you've probably never heard of this game before now is that the gameplay was absolutely atrocious. It actually most resembles Time Killers (sans gore and fatalities, strictly family friendly), a more mainstream comparison would be Yie Ar Kung Fu without the crazy jumping.
You only have the four cardinal directions for movement input, and then two attack buttons. There seems to be serious input lag, and attack hit boxes and priority are more random and confusing than the most oddball DarkStalkers character. The whole thing makes the original Street Fighter look refined and smooth. Just for comparison, at the time this came out Super Street Fighter 2 and a couple King of Fighters games were already on the market.
There is a two-player mode but it doesn't appear to be by modem, it's either one joypad and one keyboard, or two players awkwardly sharing the keyboard.
One unique quality of the game is non-sequitur full-screen animations all the time, in unexpected places ... sometimes they're REALLY LONG, but can be skipped with the space bar, and the little vignettes showing the toads wreaking havoc around the town that accompany each new start-up are particularly amusing.
7th Level nailed the art and the little extra touches like that, but unfortunately just totally whiffed on the core gameplay ... and thus this is an extreme obscurity rather than a beloved '90s classic.
Comments
Post a Comment