PowerSlave Exhumed

I kinda missed the launch due to my working schedule, and tonight I finally gave it a look. While I was messing about with the settings and was kinda disheartened not finding an ‘invert Y’ option for mouse, I suddenly decided to take my good ol’ game pad and play it like it was back in the day, with CRT and old graphics on… Boy, that was just bonkers! One of my favorite classics, and I saw a great merge of content already, like scorpions and spiders: a very good move by devs, and it also reminded me of my Exhumed experience on PC, though, unlike the console version (and mind you, I consider myself a die-hard PC Master Race member🧐) it felt a bit generic - the unique case in my whole life when a console game beats its PC counterpart (though, to be fair, the PC one isn’t bad at all). And by the way, it plays actually harder than on PC, a true hardcore experience for real men! All in all, I’m definitely going to plow it through, reviving old memories of happy childhood, and I recommend this one to everyone who played Powerslave back in the day as well as to the new players. Get it, by ANY means - you won’t regret it!✊🏻

Alright, THIS version is different than the PC/DOS version which I first played. Some sort of mashup between the console versions (which were first person shooter Metroidvanias, which this it as well) and the PC version (which was a FPS with linear levels you couldn't return to after finishing). Replay value is very high, you can go to levels over and over to shoot stuff for kicks. As you get more unlockables the game becomes gradually harder: traps are introduced into vases/crates/containers, you no longer have a crapstorm of health/ammo drops (going from "you don't use half of what drops" to "still plentiful IF YOU AIM"). I do have some issues which is why I've taken off 2 stars. Issues, plural, so stars, plural. 1. I can confirm there is no invert mouselook. You can invert gamepad look, but it doesn't affect the mouse and there is no mouse option. FOR NOW. The devs have confirmed this was an oversight and will be fixed in the next patch, but you may wish to wait for confirmation as it is REALLY hard to aim after decades of muscle memory. And flying enemies are extremely common, so aiming up/down is needed! No excuse for this kind of crap. 2. The last two weapons could have used an overhaul, or just given secondary fire to all weapons. Honestly, the Ring of Ra shoots... bouncy balls? Nightdive is at least being faithful, even to the pathetic aspects, but why? 3. I REALLY don't like the last weapon, The Manacle, in this version. The DOS version was much better, in fact it was the main reason I got this game, only to be disappointed. The DOS version spawned a cloud that teleported between all enemies in LOS and rained down lightning until everyone was dead or no more ammo: this version just basically shoots slow homing lightning that is like a shotgun version of the Cobra Staff (homing missiles). Redundant and uninteresting. Glad for modern controls! Cheats are: activate console, type "give" and Enter to see a list of spawns like "give weapons".

Movement feels great, weapons are varied and unusual but all have a use. Music has some bangers too. That's where the positives end, though they still slightly outweigh the negatives. I did have a mostly good time with this game. 1) First and foremost, the player hitbox. It's atrocious. Like really bad. Do you remember how in Doom you could dodge imp fireballs predictably even in very tight spaces? Not here, the player hitbox is huge and you need a lot of space to dodge projectiles. Which sucks because the game often puts you in corridors in front of a bunch of enemies and it feels like you just need to trade damage with them because their projectiles were literally unavoidable. Also the hitbox seems to be tied to the environmental collision, meaning that sometimes you'll kind of bounce off objects even though they look they're just out of reach. 2) The mummies and their projectiles, this is tied to my first criticism. The mummies fire homing projectiles at you, there seems to be a bit of variance to it but they generally follow you closely which can be incredibly annoying combined with your hitbox. They also can go around corners sometimes but not always. Like I say they behave a bit randomnly. The projectiles are completely silent, which means if a mummy was far away and you didn't hear his audio cue, they can snipe you from very far away and you couldn't know until they hit you. 3) Checkpoints. You can't manually save which means you're gonna be replaying parts of this game several times over The game is good overall but I think Nightdive maybe stuck a bit too closely to the original here when there was clearly room for improvement.

Powerslave/Exhumed is a shooter from Lobotomy Software based in ancient Egypt. Back in the day it was released for PC, SEGA Saturn and PlayStation. These versions were different from eachother, as the PC version was a straight up FPS, but the Saturn version was more like Hexen with different hubs you needed revisit to progress further. In my country it was called Exhumed (I still have the CD-ROM somewhere!), but in other countries it was called Powerslave, which is also the name of an Iron Maiden album. This is a good remaster which combines all the versions into one playable game. The graphics look really nice, the soundtrack is good and the shooting also kicks ass. But taking off my nostalgia goggles Powerslave/Exhumed is a pretty mediocre shooter. The enemies are boring (the first few maps you are mostly shooting bugs, eagles and jumping scorpions), the player's hitbox is too wide, making it hard to dodge projectiles in the many narrow hallways, the maps are confusing and there's too much annoying platforming. Worst of all is that they took out the manual saves and put in a terrible checkpoint save system! The checkpoints are pretty far from eachother and sometimes well hidden, making it a real chore to play if you want to quit the game, but not want to lose your progress. All in all: great remaster, but still too many flaws to be memorable. Guess I'll have to buy the original PC version too now, since that one's very different from this remaster.

I want to start by saying that I'm not criticizing this release on a technical level as Nightdive clearly put in effort to add in a good deal of options and the game itself plays fine. The graphical settings in particular are very nice and I wish more remasters/remakes had these kinds of options like the CRT filter or Z-clipping emulation. This review is purely about how I felt playing the game. My apologies for only posting the bad but all the good stuff is already abundant in the review section so bear with me. The real issues with Powerslave Exhumed is that fundamentally it's recreating the console version of Powerslave including the bad stuff. While I understand the decision to try and stick to the original gameplay I really wish they would have gone in a different direction and tried to change the bad aspects. I would have also preferred if they kept some of the PC features like the POV death animations at least as an option. There was a real opporunity here to try and marry the best parts of the PC and console versions and include new quality of life features while being able to toggle between certain things to make it closer to that original experience for the purists. -As mentioned by others, the player hitbox size and the ammo system are particualrly bad and there's really no reason to have kept these besides that they were in the original console versions. -Having to swap weapons to restore ammo to a weapon that's low or out of ammo is just silly and it would have made more sense to change it so that ammo pickups restore a bit of ammo to all weapons. -Enemies are not fun to fight either (a third of them shoot the same projectile) and there's not many distinct kinds of them, only their designs were interesting to me. Bosses lacked distinction as well, besides the last one. -Level design is very emblematic of console FPS games. Tight hallways, few open areas, and an abundance of platforming. Checkpoint system forcing replays of tough segments sucks!