Altered Beast is a rather simple beat-’em up game, that is average in almost every way. The basic premise of this game is that you are a warrior that has been brought back to life by a God so you can rescue his daughter for him. Once you are resurrected, your adventure starts right away.
Throughout the levels there are some standard baddies such as skeletons, wolves, and some other pretty generic looking monsters. To defeat the bad guys, you have to give them a select amount of punches or kicks, your only attack moves at first. The enemies aren’t really that intelligent and for the most part charge right at you. However, the game still is quite a challenge.
After you take down a few enemies, some of them drop what I call ’soul orbs’ - it’s practical enough of a name, seeing as how it’s never explained in the game. Each time you get a soul orb your character gets more buff, and grows in size. When powering up the first two times, you get to enjoy watching the stimulating animation of watching your character’s muscles grow and his shirt ripping off. The first two power-ups don’t do much to help you as far as game play goes.
Once you get the third power-up, get ready for a change of pace, this is when your character gets altered into a beast. There are various types of animals and creatures you can morph in to, but I won’t ruin that for you because it is the best part of the game. As a beast the game becomes much easier, quick, and far more fun.
After easily destroying all the easy bad guys as the beast, you will get to the boss stage. The bosses may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but are pretty easy to beat once you get the pattern or know how to beat it. The boss on the second stage is a bit broken, if you know how to beat it you can kill it in, literally, about two seconds. Thankfully, that’s the only boss in the game I encountered like that.
Altered Beast is pretty stale alone, but with a friend the game, it shines a lot brighter. The game also becomes much easier when playing co-op, which is a good thing because the game is pretty hard over all.
All in all, Altered Beast is a very average game, but when there are some classic games on the VC for even cheaper, and better beam-ups that are out already, and surely more to come, it makes this eight dollar game one hard game to recommend.
Rating: 
