PowerSlave Exhumed

Has some flaws, but still a fine game. there are a couple of soft locks in the game, and a couple during collectibles run. P.S. I would pay money for the chance to see designer of the "Canyons of Chaos" map trying to get that collectible from the set of corridors with tons of lasers, considering that huge hitbox the player has.

I've played PowerSlave, the original, a couple of tries. I only wanted to play Exhumed, just to see if the remastered experience would take away the absurdity of the original in any way. Well it only barely did that, if at all. This game was released in 1999, under the radar, as games like Quake III Arena, System Shock 2, Counter-Strike, Aliens vs Predator and Unreal Tournament were stealing the spotlight. Shooters in those days, were ready for quick run and gun. They probably didn't have the patience to deal with an obscure game, that still played like an old DOOM game with the engine that helped make Duke Nukem 3D gain fame. PowerSlave: Exhumed, is the definitive way to play this game as, as it gives some newfound life where I'd be hard-pressed to recommend toying with the original. That isn't saying much however, when you factor in how non-linear its gameplay is, how uninteresting the weaponry are, while having a cool setting, PowerSlave doesn't do anything interesting with it. It's really just one of those games that went under the radar and probably for a reason.

It's something you have to play if you like retro fps and boomer shooters. But there is too much backtracking since they made it like a metroidvania

Super fun old-style shooter, with good nice puzzle elements. Beware that ols style means dat death can happen in an instance. And the powers you collect require you to go back to previous levels to do things you cloud not do before. If you dont want to search for a really long time, I recommend finding the required (back) level order online before starting to play. But lots of fun in this originally very modest game!

Just as good as it was in 1990's

PowerSlave Exhumed is a good game but gets boring after a few hours. It's good that we didn't get the original version from 1996 on steam because that DOS original version of PowerSlave Exhumed was only good at the time it came out which it is not good anymore and aged the worst so i'm glad Nightdive remastered PowerSlave Exhumed and it would've been cool if there was a sequel.

This is an under-the-radar 2.5D shooter that plays kinda like a Metroidvania. You unlock different abilities that allow you to access areas in previous levels you couldn't get to before, so there's a lot of exploration and backtracking. The combat is quite unique compared to other boomer shooters. All the weapons use the same ammo pickups, kinda like mana, and depending on which weapon you have equipped the pickup will replenish that weapon. This leads to some interesting ammo management because some parts of the game will require you to use a certain weapon. The guns themselves are cool. My biggest issue is the game lacks a shotgun, which for this genre is basically blasphemy, but the arsenal is still fun. The style and atmosphere you can judge for yourself from the screenshots, but for me it's very cool. I think my favourite thing this game does is how you gain abilities and how it balances progression. Since Metroidvanias require a lot of backtracking, the designer needs to carefully balance giving the player powers that let you bulldoze through earlier levels while still keeping the later levels challenging. This is something this game does extremely well compared to other games in the genre like Symphony of the Night, where most of the challenge disappears after a certain point. I played this game to completion on the PS1 as well, and this is a wonderful remaster. It keeps what made the original interesting while making it much nicer to actually play today.