Games Coffer

Rastan Review

Name:	[ Rastan ]	Author:	[ Taito ]	Date:	[ 1987 ]
Publisher:	[ Imagine ]	No. Of Players:	[ 1 ]	Rating:	[ 35% ]

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Introduction..

“The evil wizard Karg, thwarted by Rastan in his attempt to overthrow the throne has opened the portals of hell and unleashed a variety of beasts and demos throughout Maranna. Only one man has proved himself true enough to confront the hordes

The Game..

Rastan was first around on the Arcades and then some what down the line was then ported to the Commodore 64 and a few other formats. Basically, the game is a side-scrolling platform adventure game in which you have to kill various monsters released from the pits of hell. Monsters aren't the only thing that are going to get in you way though, you will finding sliding doors that can crush you, lakes of death and more.

You start the game with your trusty sword and a whole load of monsters running at you, you can kill most of them with one swing of your sword. You will encounter various monsters along the way such as: Lizardmen, strange looking men with four arms that will spit fire at you, bats, and what appear to be reindeers (?) that spit fire at you too. During your travels you will encounter various weapons that you can pick up such as fire shooting swords, axes and more.

Ok, so now you know roughly what the game is about, let me explain how it plays. Well, the answer to that is.. Not good. Your movement is kind of "robotic" and what I mean by that is you cant seem to move that much at all and your movement is very limited. When you are walking along killing monsters it gets very dull and boring, basically you walk along swing, kill monster, swing, kill monster, swing, kill monster - It's the same thing over and over and gets repetitive and very boring. You have to time the swing of your sword just right otherwise the monster will start beating the crap out of you and there isn't much you can do about that. At one point a monster was "stuck" in the floor hitting me and I couldn't even hit it. You will at some points find monsters that fly - these are almost impossible to hit without you getting hit to death first.

In order to collect new weapons you will need to "hit" them with your sword. A lot of them are down pits and such and appear to be floating in mid air. In order to "hit" the new weapon you have to swing your sword at it while falling. Now, this sounds easy buts its not because sometimes you find yourself swinging at it madly and appearing to hit it but nothing happens and once you have fallen past it, you cant get it no more - Frustrating. Also, simple tasks such as going up and down ropes is kind of annoying. You have to line up exactly and the right points to go up and down the rope, if you fall off the rope, you will slowly fall back down and have to do it again, just to fall off it again.

Overall...

I've never actually played the original version of this so I cant compare the two as such. The Commodore 64 version of Rastan, I must admit, is very poor. The controls and horrible and the graphics aren't amazing. One good thing about the game is the music, its very cool, especially the on the second level. My final thoughts on the game though is don't bother.