[1] Using a fantasy motif, the game takes place in the land of the Cat People, a race of feline humanoids, who are threatened by the evil Norka.

Players move from left to right fighting their way through levels filled with monsters and environmental hazards like water, chasms, lava and fireballs.

[4] There are a number of power-ups (usually in hidden sections of each level) like "Energy Drinks" that replenish health, and "Life Spheres" which grant more lives.

After an unpleasant time in the palace's dungeon, he is summoned by the King and is assigned a quest: the Lionheart, the holiest (and titular) relic of the Cat People and center of their religion, has been stolen by thieves sent by the evil Norka.

If the King is not able to demonstrate his divine right to rule by publicly displaying the holy relic in the upcoming Showing Festival, he will be forced to abdicate and be replaced by his arch-chancellor Nargle.

[5][7] Furthermore, the night the Lionheart was stolen, Valdyn's beloved Ilene was praying in the Temple's entrance chamber and the thieves turned her to stone using a very rare poison which can only be found in Norka's country.

I moved to Germany of course just like Erwin and had to sleep the first half-year in the office on a mattress and occasionally taking a shower at Eric Simon's house (producer of Thalion Software back then).

We spent countless hours playing new PC-Engine, Mega Drive and Super Famicom imports and visiting the arcade hall to check out new games.

After finishing Ghost Battle (1991) as freelancers, Austrian programmer Erwin Kloibhofer and Dutch graphic designer Henk Nieborg got an in-house job at Thalion.

In terms of gameplay, they wanted to test and showcase all the experience and skills they had cultivated over the years, since they decided to make the transition into game development.

[14] Erik Simon called it an "ambitious" and "non profit-oriented" project, openly admitting in a 1993 interview that, even though "we hope to get our development costs back, we don't believe in it".

[9] In the March 1993 issue of Play Time, Kloibhofer and Nieborg mention that also helpful were Matthias Mörstedt, "the master of sound routines", as well as Wolfgang Breyha and Reinhardt Franz, "without whom the program would not run on 1 MB machines".

[12] According to Simon, the game's parallax scrolling didn't require any demo-style programming, as "Erwin and Michael were just very skilled 68000 programmers who knew exactly what they were doing", adding that "much of Lionheart's routines, where processing speed was of minor importance, were even written in C".

[13] In a 1993 interview with The One, Erik Simon said that Thalion didn't even bother copy-protecting Lionheart, "because there's no point in simply delaying the pirates from cracking the games and sticking them on bulletin boards.

They rated it 90%, concluding that "it's very hard to find anything bad to say about it", and "with all the cutesy platform games that seem to be the rage right now, it's nice to see an old fashioned hacker popping up.

[23] The One agreed and gave Lionheart an overall score of 91%, stating that it's "without a doubt, the finest example of its kind, mainly because it actually tries to introduce some degree of originality into the gameplay rather than simply being content to just bombard the gamer with large sprawling levels and calling it 'a challenge' ...

The variety of the game is amazing - one minute you can be swinging from vines, hacking at monsters, the next leaping up a giant tower as a bursting river creeps higher".

[6] According to Computer and Video Games, "Thalion has gone and turned in an extremely challenging variation on the old theme", with "excellent graphics" and enough depth "to keep you going for weeks".

They also praised the soundtrack for "adding a real cinema-like air to it all" and the game's animation, "particularly the motion blur on the sword, and the dynamic movement as [Valdyn] turns and slashes".

They gave the game a score of 87% concluding that Thalion created "one of the best platform beat-em-ups ever, on console or computer (...) a graphical masterpiece with enough gameplay to keep you going for weeks on end".

They called the animation "excellent", noting that "Valdyn's teetering on a ledge when he needs to jump not only looks impressive but also becomes an integral part of the game" and said that the fans of arcade adventures will appreciate this title.

They also found its use of parallax scrolling to be "unparalleled" on the Amiga and commended the level design for introducing elements which felt like "a breath of fresh air" in a very worn out genre void of much originality.

On the other hand, "Lionheart Remake Enhanced" attempts to provide a faithful port of the original game, while offering options like higher resolutions and transparencies in place of interlacing effects.