DOMAN
Original Release: World Software, 1994, Amiga
DOMAN! What is best in life? An obvious Conan/Golden Axe derivative that runs on the Franko engine, Doman nevertheless carved its own path with solid gameplay and lurid gore
Doman (Amiga, World Software, 1994)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: Amiga Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Ol' Doman the Marmarian over here makes clear it's a Conan IP knockoff right from the beginning, even aping Basil Poledouris' iconic theme song on the title screen. But it turns out it's actually a delightfully brutal and atmospheric beat em up, that manages to be fun despite the Amiga's clunky one-button joystick style.
Golden Axe, which was kind of another Conan bootleg, is the obvious comparison at first look here. One of the characters does appear to come from the Ax Battler family, and both have the elaborate "twirl backwards into attempted beheading" move. However, the gameplay has a very different feel. You hold the button down and press a direction to do a variety of swing types, which are geared toward specific situations. You do the most damage with your basic swing combo, but it'll hem you up when multiple foes are near (and they're brutal about surrounding you in this game). A leap-forward attack quickly puts incoming foes down but does only tiny damage. So on and so forth.
These different moves also result in different death animations when you strike the final blow on an enemy, all of them gruesome and over-the-top. Some moves lead to an obvious decapitation, others a throat-slitting, but the best one is cleaving a dude's skull in half. A "shop" of sorts found around halfway through each level adds to the complexity of both your available moves and finishers. You seem to be able to pick one new weapon for free, accompanied by what appear to be copy protection questions in which you have to pick three runes (likely cracked in nearly any version you download). There's a pretty broad range that change up your available moves and animations, you can even pick a crossbow (though you shouldn't as the enemies no-sell the damage and it's the absolute worst weapon).
Enemy scripting is no great shakes and they're very manageable when faced one at a time, but that never happens. It's always packs of at least two or three and they're merciless in moving behind you and taking swings while you're otherwise engaged, and even the common foes take off big hunks of your life with each hit. They can also do finishers on you, so if you charge into a pack in no time at all you'll have Gandalf or some Ringwraith slicing your head off. The only thing that keeps the game doable is that you get a bunch of lives and continues, but it's still pretty tough to complete all five of its levels (which are fairly long). It's not the most sophisticated engine, but at least it's realistic in how a bunch of brigands would actually fight.
When World Soft/Mirage is discussed it's usually for their prior title Franko: The Crazy Revenge, a similarly lurid spectacle that sort of became the poster child for the emerging amateur-commercial game design scene that sprung up in Poland right after the fall of communism. Doman is kinda the group's unheralded classic, though. They clearly learned a lot from missteps in Franko, really evening out the controls and timing to make everything less clumsy and more enjoyable. It also has better graphics and more nice touches of detail in the backgrounds, and the level of extreme violence is more in keeping with the "dark fantasy" source genre but something that Sega et. al. could never get away with in their products. Interestingly, Doman turns out to have been a mid-80s comic that was released exclusively in Poland ... I assume, as they did with other things, the developers didn't get the author's permission to use the IP in a game, so this may well be a bootleg of a bootleg property!
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