"Rise from your...damn it..."

Again, Sega is known for their action games in the early days. One of their first times out was with Altered Beast in which you take control of a dead soul and fight your way through hordes of the undead to save a girl whom you loved in a past life. Setting a strange standard in the way that action side scrolling games were played, Altered Beast features mindless fighting and endless hordes of enemies that ranged from the disgusting to the mediocre! As you would figure from the name, at certain points, you could morph into a different Beast in different stages with the collection of power-ups.

While not the most inventive, or even the most challenging, the draw of Altered Beast is the fact that the game is so mindlessly simple any gamer of any age or skill could play this so it makes it a pick up and go type of game. The game doesn't really offer any difference in the Boss department, in which you fight a different incarnation of the same bad guy throughout the game up until the end! As the game progresses, you collect power-ups that take your character through a change akin to extreme steroid use until they freak out and turn into a beast of various types that range from wolves to tigers to dragons.

Once you’ve turned into one of your animal alter ego types, you go through the game with powerful attacks that really make an impact on whatever you’re facing off against. While this may seem interesting enough, the mindless action that you encounter and the different forms that you undertake are something that might catch and keep your interest for more than a few minutes anyway. The different forms that you use really don’t do much to the overall game play except throw you into a different way of attacking your enemies. Differences like these really don’t make much challenge and while you are at an advantage, the enemies still take the same amount of damage they would if you weren’t in beast mode.

This goes for the huge bosses that you go up against as well, because if you missed the power ups on the way through, you’ll be turned into a werewolf or tiger or something along those lines just so you can take on the boss. Other than that, there isn’t much more to the game other than smashing out whatever comes your way, and with two players, you’ll find that the game is a way to torture your friend and show them what old school really is. Mindlessly simple, all you have to do is hit the attack button and jump up to other platforms from time to time.

Back and forth motion is what this game is all about, and again, any gamer of any age can learn to use the ultra simplistic control to their advantage! The game pretty much revolves around using the attack button and the jump button, both of which can be used easily enough, although if you‘re playing on a really old cabinet, and the buttons don’t quite respond, you may be up a creek. With that being said, you’ll also find that the game has nothing to offer in terms of special moves or advanced control inputs, so you or your little brother can beat on the game and not have to think to hard while doing it.

While well drawn, Altered Beast suffers from an aliment known as image break-up. As the stages go on, and the action gets more and more intense, the images on the screen start to break down from the amount of things going on during the battle. Even though this isn't a complete downfall, it is noticeable and very distracting at times! The stages themselves are little more than drawn in and mood attempting animations that have no life or anything else to them! What you’ll also find is that the game tends to rely on mass amounts of the same enemy coming at you and they come at you slow enough that you can easily avoid them when you have to. With all of this in mind, it is a very old action game that doesn’t really revolve around supreme special effects or even extensive detail.

The music is also not the best that can be heard out of any action game there is. With flat beats and a very tinny sound that blares from the speakers, the sound effects clash together with the metallic sounding music that the game was programmed with forcing a massive headache! The stages really don’t change much in terms of what you hear, and after awhile, you may want to turn the sound down or completely off. Different scores come in between the stages when you see your woman being tortured, and it is supposed to cause rifts of anger and the like. What it really does is prepare you for more of the same music that you heard in the last stage!

While Altered Beast is a grandfather of action, it is a mediocre game with very view innovations, even in it's prime! With the image problems as well as the mindless game play and tinny audio, there isn't much that would or could impress anyone in the arcades today. Quickly fading into classic gaming as one of the first and probably more mediocre action games, Altered Beast is a game that only classic gamers and old school Sega fans will enjoy. If you’re looking for something more in the action department, then you might want to look for something along the lines of Final Fight or perhaps Ninja Gaiden.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/27/01, Updated 08/05/03