Games section

5. Review: Heretic II

Anyone who has seen screenshots from Heretic II would put the usual dissing on hold and agree that this is the lavish game of all time for the Amiga. It has to be heavy duty to need 64 Mb of RAM minimum and PowerPC. Heretic II is the second PowerPC only Amiga game, following WipeOut 2097. Many Amiga users have played the PC version of HII so expectations were high and the release was eagerly awaited. The Amiga Heretic II made its debut at the Neuss show, in full-commercial-package glory (box, printed manual, 2 CD-ROMs).

As the name implies, Heretic II is a sequel to Heretic, which has become open source and been ported to the Amiga. In H1 the final fight was between the hero, Corvus, and D'sparil. Corvus won, but fell under a curse that exiled him to another dimension. It took him two years to master the magic that would open the dimensional gate and let him return to his home, where further adventures awaited...

The installation of Heretic II is nicely designed and hassle free, but takes some time because 500Mb has to be shovelled on to some corner of your hard disk. You will have to enter the serial number of your copy of the game. The installed game runs from hard disk, but needs the CD-ROM left in the drive.

Heretic II starts with a really "fat" intro, which tells in pictures the story of Corvus described above. The intro runs quite smoothly, slowed down at times by CD-ROM access, but this should not be a problem with faster CD-ROM drives (>20x). Once into the game I was impressed by graphics power not always seen on Intel platforms. Heretic II is a standard 3D-shooter, with the fun enhanced by its immense graphics and lavish sound. Not all levels look the same in Heretic II - there are extras, changes in design from level to level and and many different, nicely animated weapons and opponents.

On PowerPCs with graphics board and 3D-accelerator Heretic II can be played fine in 640x480. AGA-mode users are not so lucky - you have to choose a lower resolution. Another plug for graphics boards - they speed this game up a lot.

Conclusion: Heretic II is the top-of-the-list game for action fans. Graphics like this have never existed on the Amiga before. This game should even be bought by people who hate 3D-shooters - if you have a system which can run Heretic II you have to get this game because it is the only one which uses the full power of your computer! It's just phantastic!