Amiga Tribute: Lionheart by LukeTheRipper

Valdyn from Lionheart

Part 14/24 of my Amiga tribute project >3

This time, it's a title called Lionheart
For starters, this guy is NOT Leo from Warzard/Red Earth, even though they look remarkably alike, though for one, Valdyn came out way earlier, and two, Valdyn is an anthropomorphic lion-man, while Leo is a human guy with a lion's head. Well, or they just both got designed with a "barbarian with a lion's head" theme in mind |3

Anyways, back to the game, I must say, it's a pretty odd case. Right after it's release, it was one of the most popular Amiga games around, with it's stunning graphics and color palette (the creators merely used a few tricks to make it look like there's more colors than usual), stunningly fluent animation, and some great music scores to boot. It might not look like much now, but trust me, it dropped peoples' jaws left and right. The gameplay was also pretty good, the controls weren't as clunky as one might think, the sword could be swung in different directions so attacking was all that easier (though yeah, the timing needed some practice), the difficulty level was challenging, but not frustrating (especially considering the overall difficulty back then). The odd thing is, despite it's quality, it surprisingly lacked staying power, after the initial boom, and some hype along the way, it just kinda blended in, or in some cases, faded away. It's really sad to see such a game get forgotten like that, much like many great titles get overlooked nowdays.

It's also worth mentioning, that while Valdyn looks like lion-man he's supposed to be in all the cutscenes, his ingame sprite looks like a plain human... almost like a completely different character (not to mention, his "outfits" undergoes some minor changes as well), but I thought I'd stick with the cutscene design, after all, fur goes much better with my style >3
And I must say, that game had one huge plus in my book, the spider. Hell, the giant spider enemies were some of the best designed and animated spiders I have EVER seen in a video game, honestly 8D (the first one is around 9:00 of the vid)

Other parts of the project - Shadow Of The Beast, Shadow Fighter, Zool, The Chaos Engine, Superfrog, Skeleton Krew, The Speris Legacy, Flashback, Agony, Brutal: Paws of Fury, Fightin' Spirit, Ruff 'N' Tumble, SwitchBlade, Lionheart, The Lost Vikings, Brian The Lion, Wolfchild, Gods, Entity, Franko: The Crazy Revenge, Hired Guns, Turrican, The Killing Game Show, Yo! Joe!


Valdyn (c) Thalion Software