Shadow Of The Beast Remake Is Coming To The PS4 In May

Heavy Spectrum's Shadow of the Beast has been on the down-low in the media sphere for quite some time. Shortly after being announced the game practically disappeared and hasn't been featured much in promo material... until now. The developers announced that the game is arriving on the PS4 starting May 17th.

Over on the PlayStation blog, Heavy Spectrum's founder and CEO, Matt Birch, discussed what the influences were for the game and how they're excited about the remake of Shadow of the Beast finally releasing on the PS4 this upcoming May.

The news was accompanied with a behind the scenes look at the development and inspiration for Shadow of the Beast, where they reiterate what Birch states in the PlayStation blog about the game being inspired by old beat-'em-up titles like Golden Axe. You can check out the behind the scenes video below, where they show off more of the gameplay, some of the combos and the finishing moves that you can perform throughout the adventure.

You may have noticed that the story this time around is very different from the original Shadow of the Beast on the Sega Genesis and Amiga. In the original players took control of a man who was transformed by an evil mage into a beast, becoming a killing machine in the process. While Birch and the video above talk a lot about the combos and fighting, in the original game it wasn't much of a fighter at all, it was more of an action-platformer. Yeah, the beast could punch things but it was more about timing and reflexes given how punishing the game was at throwing enemies at you out of nowhere.

This time around the story is a lot more cohesive from the get go. They don't just throw you out in the middle of nowhere and expect you fumble around to find the story (and in the case of the original, you wouldn't know the whole story unless you had the booklet that actually explained what was going on).

For the PS4 remake, players don the role of a killing machine bred for combat and destined for war. His name is Aarbron. This killer ends up on a foreign planet under the control of an evil mage, but soon Aarbron escapes free and begins to uncover the mysteries of the planet Karamoon while growing his power.

Players will have melee attacks at their disposal in Shadow of the Beast, but they will also have a gun at their disposal as well. They don't show off the gun in action in the video above, but the violence and mayhem that comes with it must be devastating just based on its design alone.

And speaking of designs, Heavy Spectrum managed to get the original artist and designer of the creature from the original Shadow of the Beast, Roger Dean, to redesign the creature for today's generation of gaming. It still looks disturbingly impressive.

You can look for Shadow of the Beast to launch exclusively on the PS4 starting May 17.