Shadow of the Beast's PS4 Reboot Gets Its Claws Out

Shadow of the Beast is back, and it's packing more gore than a Hostel movie. Sony's long awaited reboot of the Psygnosis classic was announced over 18 months ago at GamesCom 2013, but has been kept undercover ever since. Many assumed that it had been cancelled, but developer Heavy Spectrum has been busy beavering away on it behind closed doors.

And it's finally got its first gameplay footage, which you can watch courtesy of the Eurogamer.net video embedded below. Despite the drawn out development process, the title's still in pre-alpha – and this is due to the British studio boasting a very small team. However, there's clearly bloody promise in the action, as protagonist Aarbron is shown shredding through his foes.

A few things are worthy of note: this looks very faithful to the original, with the complex alien architecture of Karamoon very much intact. The combat, however, looks much deeper than the duck-and-punch action of the Amiga original, with character action-esque combos brought to life with some pretty complex animations.

According to the developer, it teamed up with Sony on the game's initial computer generated trailer, and has been working to match the same style and tone ever since – it looks like it's pulled it off. One thing that it's still remaining coy on, however, is the audio; Eurogamer.net seems to think that original composer David Whittaker is involved.

If that's true, then this could well be a brilliant revival – but is all of the blood and gore doing it for you? Rip off a few limbs in the comments section below.