Into the Abyss I'll fall, the Eye of Horus. Into the eyes of the night, watching me go.

PowerSlave: Exhumed fucking rules. Always nice to try out a game with not a whole lot of expectations and end up finding something pretty special.

Just a good ol' retro First Person Shooter at first glance, but beyond the surface you'll find one of the most challenging and tightly designed metroidvania-style adventure games out there. I find it pretty awesome how this game came out a good two years before Turok 2 and it puts that game to shame in every way possible.

The story is basically non-existent, but it serves as a good excuse to bring out some really unique ancient egypt-themed visuals, alongside an excellent and memorable soundtrack.

It ALMOST got 5 stars out of me, but I have to admit that there are some annoyances in the level design that hold the game back slightly (the randomly exploding vases, for example) and the final boss fight is admittely underwhelming compared to the previous ones. But it honestly? I wouldn't be shocked if I end up raising the rating at some point in the future.

Night Dive are honestly heroes for remastering gems like this for the PC. Go check it out! It's pretty cheap on steam.

From a historical perspective, this is pretty cool. The integration of unlockable traversal mechanics into a more straightforward kind of 90s FPS level design is impressive, all the more so years before the concept of "metroidvania" would begin to crystallize as something that could be applied across genres. The level design itself is quite good as well, quietly communicating secrets and guiding the player to understanding when there's more of a level to explore and when you need to come back with more mechanics. The enemy design is a little shaky, which makes traversing through the world more of a pain than it could be, but it's not too bad.

This was also my first real 90s FPS—I've never sat down and played through Doom or Quake—and I think that era of the genre (or maybe just the genre entire) is not entirely my thing. I didn't finish this not because I was getting frustrated, but because managing the fights and my ammo/health balance was just exhausting. Still a good experience to have, though!

This game is an oldie but a goodie.

It was a pretty good DOOM clone with really interesting pacing of levels and secrets. It's not going to blow your mind, but it will impress you with the thought put into the design of the levels.

It's not that long of an FPS, even for it's time. It is however really cool and still worth the try if you like boomshoot.

Wow this is a much worse game than I had hoped for. To be honest, the setting is what made me interested in the game. I just like ancient egyptian settings in video games. The soundtrack has some nice fitting tracks from what little I have heard, but everything else is just not fun at all. The level design is dated af, the weapons are terrible, the hit reactions are just a white flicker and there is no variety in the enemies. The latest enemy addition I saw were those mummies that shoot homing magic snakes at you, but those are basically the same enemies just a bit reskinned and more annoying as the mages that shoot these blue projectiles at you. Skip this one if you do not have nostalgia for it, its just not a fun game imo.

Pretty good! The concept of an FPS adventure in the sort of hub-and-spokes layout, where revisiting levels with more growth is part of mandatory progression, is novel and interesting. Doesn't have a ton of staying power beyond that unique design, but the game's also pretty short so it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Now, I've never played the original Powerslave, but I do feel like some of the remaster changes don't quite fit right. Some of the team doll boosts make parts of the came cumbersome and difficult, and Pharaoh-level enemy changes don't feel like they were done super well. I guess I just need to play Powerslave EX and see what it's like.

A great port of a 90s classic with some real care and consideration put into it. Having not played it previously, I was extremely impressed at the quality of the level design (notably, I never got lost in the mazy levels even though I thought the keys and doors were visually too indistinct and the map isn't great) and the weapons were decent, though it did lack a good shotgun equivalent.

The thing that I liked the most was the sense of progression though. It goes from a game where you slowly pick off enemies with a pistol and can tank a fair amount of damage to one where you're a glass cannon flying around spewing fire and lightning from your hands; it reminded me of the progression in Control. The intelligent map design made returning to levels for items and new routes a lot of fun.

Thanks to the addition of checkpoints the game feels surprisingly fresh, too. If I'd been chucked to the start of a level on death I might have found it a bit frustrating but having checkpoints (and no quick saving) meant that I just had to push on rather than getting too caught up on things. I did have to manually restart a level once when I hit a checkpoint with almost no health and a bunch of tough enemies ahead but otherwise it felt nicely balanced.

Having watched some videos of the 'original' PC version running on Build I'd like to give that a look too, as it looks completely different aside from the graphics.

Wow, I really enjoyed this game! It has a light Metroid flourish
with the abilities you unlock giving you access to new routes in previously beaten stages that unlock new levels. The power progression is sick, by the end of this game you will fly like an eagle and dive like a dolphin.

I rarely felt lost in a level or about where to go next and enjoyed the enemy types. It's wild that this is not mentioned in the same breath as other build engine games. Admittedly, the original was locked to consoles with the pc release being a standard shooter, but this new version by night dive proves it's more than deserving of a playthrough.

I never experienced the original PS or Saturn versions, but Nightdive has been killing it with these remasters, so I felt comfortable giving this a shot. It's got some charming jank to it - your hitbox is considerably larger than other games from around this era, including other Build Engine games, e.g. Duke Nukem and Blood. That said, this was one of the earliest examples of a proper FPS / Metroidvania and it is a fun, if dated, example of it. While games like Strife included backtracking and progression across levels, Powerslave leans more into the true Metroidvania aspect of, "there is a ledge / gateway in plain sight, but you cannot access it yet because you lack the ability to (jump that high / pass those kinds of thresholds / touch that surface)," and so on.

Gameplay loop aside, the game feels fantastic. Tight controls, lovely visuals that were polished up while still maintaining their original charm (i.e. not smoothed out or giving off any sort of Vaseline-coated vibe). Kudos to Nightdive for making an old Build Engine game feel this good to play. While Ion Fury is an example of a recent game that does it well, other older examples like Blood and Nukem 3D, as much as I love them, can feel very rough around the edges. This really didn't feel that way at all, apart from some inherent jank in the original game itself from a development standpoint, like the aforementioned hitboxes.

From a price : playtime perspective, it's definitely on the shorter side. I did some extra (optional) collecting before I finished the main game, so realistically, blowing through this with no extra side collecting would probably take a casual player ~4.5 hours. Going for a full 100% / all achievements would likely add a significant amount to your total playtime, at least a few hours more if I had to guess.

tl;dr: If you're a fan of boomer shooters, and you don't mind some Metroidvania-like gameplay aspects thrown into the mix, this is a good pickup.

>Looking for a new Doom-like
>Ask in forums if PowerSlave is any good
>Users don't understand
>I pull out illustrated diagram explaining what good progression, enemy and level design is
>User laughs and says "it's a good game sir"
>Buy game
>Its a metroidvania

An ambitious combination of first person shooter and Metroid-like backtracking exploration. Only let down by it being such an early rendition of the idea. Its ideas are a bit half baked owing to it being a trailblazer rather than an iterator. I feel like someone revisiting this idea of a run and gun metroidvania could make something truly great today.

But, man, what's here is still pretty darn good. There's really nothing else like it. The Egyptian setting is still unique today, the sprite work still totally beautiful, the core metroidvania-lite design rarely touched on in the FPS genre.

If you play it, play it on normal. The original game didn't have any difficulty settings so the highest ones here were added in just for the port. The game isn't exactly designed around them and the developer doesn't recommend them for a first time player. Go ahead on normal. It's a little breezy, but that's OK. It's really fun to blast apart some mummies and whatnot.

The setting, soundtrack and weapon designs are the highlights of the game. The remaster itself is also of good quality. I never had any performance or stability issues.
Outdated level design and clunky platforming hold this game back. It's one of those key hunting games, but the amount of backtracking is insane. If you run out of bombs, you run the risk of soft-locking your progress, as they're needed to blow up certain walls (which can be hard to spot at times). You do get pretty powerful at the end, but it only lasts for a couple of levels.
I'd only recommend this game to those who want to relive the nostalgia of the original release. As for everyone else; there are better games to play, even from that era.

Have never gotten the chance to play the original version so its nice to have an easy to access version on Steam. I know a lot of people have played this prior, but this is looking at this for someone who has never played before. Powerslave is an excellent metroidvania style first person shooter with fun map design that's intricate, but you never get lost in. If you enjoy Doom and Metroid Prime this is a fun mix between both of them, but with some awesome power ups. Floating around levels feels great and mowing down enemies is excellent. It took around 5-6 hours to beat, and I had a great time with it, honestly its a perfect length because anymore might have been tiring. Highly recommend to any old school gaming fans.

Kind of teeters between a 3 and 3.5 for me.

It's a really fun shooter that I honestly had never heard of prior to a friend mentioning it in a discord chat that this remake was coming out.

The music is fantastic and sets the scene super well, the guns and weapons are unique and a lot of fun to use, and I can't say I really had a bad time so to speak.

However, I wasn't the biggest fan of the ammo system, as there were many times I was stuck at a point longer than needed not because of difficulty, but because I was out of ammo and chad to just keep resetting the checkpoint until I got things my way.

Also, the story was alright, but nothing really amazing (and also was really hard to hear the Ramses character at times since the music overpowers him and there's no subtitles for his dialogue)

I think this is still at least worth a look if you think it interests you. I don't think you'll be disappointed if you try it out.

A really ambitious game for a build engine era game, particularly in level design. Sometimes that ambition bites it in the ass, but it results in a cool game still.

A big thing about this game over it's fellow shooters' of the era is it's progression which is often compared to a metroidvania. In short as you progress through the game you'll unlock new movement options/ect (longer underwater breathing, bigger jumps, floating, ect). This will make new paths/items available in previously done levels, which will let you progress further in the game.
The pros of this is that the items make the movement fun, and the level design is pretty spiffy to benefit it. One of the last items might as well be flight, and somehow it doesn't completely break the game.
The Cons is that going back and repeating levels actually kinda sucks. You go through Karzak or w/e its called like 4+ times through the game, and while it's neat to see what part you can go in now with the new relic it's tiresome. you can also feel the devs realizing that the backtracking isn't actually that cool because by the half way point of the game you stop reseting to karzak constantly and becomes really fast to get to the part of an old level you did that unlocks a new level. You also need to backtrack to get the items that unlock the true endings, and that is a vibe killer for me imo. (that being said i think like all of these have skips you can do with grenade jumping or w/e to get them early, but w/e)
Backtracking can work for a lot of games, but there's something about backtracking through actual levels that's killer.

I think the last few levels are kinda wack and there's some actual obtuse sections, but most of the levels in this game are really cool, especially with a pretty big emphasis on platforming/movement, and most are pretty complicated.

Most enemy types are more annoying than enjoyable. There's nothing Insanely Offensive but there's a pretty small amount of and there's stuff like the mummies with tracking attacks with insanely vague rules for how they track you, or the lava snakes which feel like timesinks to fight.

Cool gun selection, it takes a while for the game to unlock the weird guns though. I don't really have much to say about them other than I think the RA ring is cool and I enjoy a M-60 and flamethrower being propped up as ancient egyptian artifact. That being said I dont like all the weapons using the same ammo source especially seeing how much ammo you get is mostly based on random drops from enemies/pots, it leads to a lot of awkward moments of ammo conservation and you will cherish the full ammo replinish items like they wre family. Infact i don't like most of your item drops just being RNG from destructible objects/enemies, especially when they started adding those pots that just explode sometimes. If you were the guy who added that i wish you the worst.

Also, the actual nightdive remaster aspect of the game is pretty fantastic. Looks great, runs great, sounds great, and the game itself already had a fun egpytian aesthetic and even has some cool tracks. The most weird issues i saw was the fire snake monsters in particular has a weird issue where half their sprite would vanish fairly often, but it's w/e. Checkpoins I believe is a exhumed release thing and I consider it a godsent because on hard sometimes i'd just randomly get my ass ate by things like exploding pots, but if you're a purist you can turn them off.

Ambitious ideas that are 50% really cool 50% drag it down, cool aesthetic, movement and level designs with descent guns and meh enemies. It's a cool unique game among build engine era games despite it's flaws, I'd recommend it.