uiruki
PowerSlave: Exhumed 2022
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
February 19, 2022
Platforms Played
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.
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.