
Evil has spread everywhere, rotting corpse are roaming the woods, children aren't safe, and the world is generally a scary place. A few good monks to scare away the evil (!) would sure help the neighborhood. Fortunately you, the young warrior Rohan, have arrived to deliver death and justice to the evil hordes. His mission is to free the old monks who are trapped in stone (became statues!) by the evil Draxos. With weapons in hand, you must enter the Risky Woods and free the monks from their petrified captivity. Once you've set the monks free and sent Draxos back to his evil home, wisdom will be restored for good.
You start with simple (and unlimited) knives, and whenever you destroy a Gatekeeper, you have a chance to pick up different and better weapons. Moreover, you'll often find bags or chest, and their contents will scattered on the ground. By collecting their contents you may get armor links, find magic items (such as immunity from monster's touch, more time or a fire spirit who temporarily follows you, killing enemies) or collect coins which can be used at the end of a level to buy more weapons.
When you kill a monster, it may also drop armor too. But whenever an enemy strikes you or you fall off a platform, you lose a number of notches off your current life. Lose all (11) notches and you lose a life.
Gameplay is incredibly unfair at times, killing you where you have no control, taking time away and punishing you for things that aren't your fault (too much luck is needed sometimes when you jump over platforms, above deadly pits and shooting incoming hordes of foes at the same time)
Risky Woods is a typical and rather difficult arcade action game, which offers a lot of nice visuals, great sound and furious gameplay!
Technically, the Amiga version is very good. It features nice graphics and backgrounds, having way more detail compared to the ST, and in some cases, is better when compared to the MS-DOS version! The game here offers a multi-colored background. The entire background layer has been created using sprites, and the background pattern repeats every 64 pixels which is created using four 16-color sprites and redrawing them horizontally across each line! The visuals though on the PC look superior to the original Amiga, using more on-screen colors (256 in total), but scrolling is smoother and sprites move faster in the Amiga version.
Soundwise, the Amiga version offers a remarkable introductory tune along with several sampled SFX but surprisingly, no music at the same time (you must choose either SFX or music)!