In the first half of the 90s, the Amiga scene was completely inundated with 2D, usually side-scrolling, sometimes top-down, shoot'em-ups. In the second half of the same decade, developers tried to do their best to create a similar situation with first-person shooters. On the whole, Testament seems to have been one of the better ones, at least according to Andy Smith in his Quake review in Amiga Format, Issue 111, June 1998:
All we've ever had are clones on the Amiga—Testament, Nemac IV and a handful of the others have been good games in their own rights but it's obvious they're Doom clones. Good Doom clones though, because although they look pretty shoddy in parts (some of the monsters in Testament are very 1988), they were great fun to actually play.
Hardware Requirements
Of course, the main question with these shooters is always: What kind of Amiga will they run on? The APC & TCP Support Page has this to say about hardware requirements:
Minimal configuration: Amiga 1200, 2MB chip memory
Recommended configuraton: Amiga 1200 or higher, accelerator with FastRAM, mouse or joystick, hard drive
Supported: more floppy drivesThe major problems may occur due to lack of RAM space. Game's engine is a very complicated program processing a many data in a very short time so it must keep almost all data constantly loaded in RAM (the access to a hard disk and to a floppy disk is very very much slower). If the game will not work properly (after installation on the hard disk) please look for the solution in unavavilable free RAM. If you have only 2MB of this memory try to replace all devices, files, and disks' partition tables installed in RAM before you run Testament. The game should run while you have 1.8MB of computing memory free. If the game won't have necessary memory available it will never work properly. Enough space of available RAM can be provided either in upper workbench line or with the help of AVAIL command in command prompt (CLI). If only the FastRAM is installed the game will become much faster and stable but more then that you will be able to turn on the music and use more options otherway denied.
Links and Reviews
- More of a Wolfenstein clone than a Doom clone,
Joachim Froholt cautions but concludes:
All in all, Testament is a worthy addition to your first person shooter collection. It'll take some time getting used to the simple control system and the limitations of the engine, but the game is well worth perserving with. And even though there aren't any groundbreaking gameplay features in Testament, it is a hugely entertaining and atmospheric game which stands up surprisingly well when compared to the best 3D shooters of today.
- Hall of Light
