It opens promisingly enough with an exquisite piece of piano music which bears lengthy listening, but start the game and your ears assailed with what sounds like a hyperactive five-year-old wearing boxing gloves discovering the 'orchestra stab' effect on his big brother's Casio keyboard. The sound, frankly, is where it all goes horribly wrong for Agony. But - hey! - this is not crap, so that is enough of that comparison. The graphics are in a very similar style, some of the little motifs from that game (like the rope bridge) are present here, and even some of the attack waves (the fish leaping out of the water at you, for example) are the same. Even the furthest-away areas are animated, with waterfalls cascading down mountains and rope bridges swinging in the wind, while the foreground is littered with little jokes like the gravestone with 'The Bitmap Brothers' name written on it.Ĭuriously enough though, the thing that springs to mind most when you are playing Agony is a shoot-'em-up version of Shadow of the Beast II. Personally, I much prefer playing this to Project X.Īgony consists of six reasonably longs scrolling levels, each featuring very (very) pretty graphic backdrops and multi-level parallax scrolling (the raging seas of the first level, with three layers of water rolling and chopping while rain pours down, is a particularly impressive sight - Project X, chew your heart out). It is relaxing and pleasant to play, but by definition that means there is very little you could call excitement or tension to be found in it.

It seems quite tough, but you find yourself on the fourth of the six levels inside half-a-dozen-games, and completion is not much further away, although at least you only get a few lives and no continues (what is the point of having continues in a computer game anyway? Why not give you fifteen lives or whatever at the start? These things keep me awake at nights, y'know) to make it too easy. It has got brilliant intro music, but the worst in-game music I have heard in years (well, it is not technically bad, but musically it is, um, an individual taste).

Agony is astonishingly lovely to look at, but very simplistic to play.

Free download agony