Another potential stunner from the hands of the late C64 era legends, Cosmos Designs.
This time with a sequel to one of their most classic and well remembered C64 titles, “Lions Of The Universe”. This game was to take off where the last game left, with more heavy blasting action, bigger and better enemy attackwaves and larger maps.
The preview gives an indication of a few of these things, and is quite large in itself. The game’s big critisism would be that it doesn’t seem to move on too much away from it’s prequel, being very much the same game with different maps. However, the game is still a joy to play, and the preview but only increases anticipation for a sequel.
Sadly, the sequel was never to be. Planned for release on the Cherry Software label, Cosmos Designs seemed to have left the C64 scene due to poor sales of their games, and realised that they had to leave for pastures new. This meant that 3 of their games were left, including Lions 2.
Hannes Sommer recently told GTW that the game was indeed cancelled because the C64 was dying and there was no profit to be made. The game was very complex to build, especially with the enemy patterns and constant testing, so the effort would have been too much for little reward. Hannes moved onto other projects on the Apple platform.
It is not known if Cosmos Designs still have anything of their games, in possibly a later form than what is in the previews, but we are hopeful that Hannes may have more of Lions 2 and even others. Watch this space for now….
A sad end to a possible Lions series…
Contributions: Hannes Sommer, Jazzcat
