P.O.W. is as standard a beat em up as they come. You punch, kick, and jump-kick your way through 4-and-a-half short levels to escape from a vaguely Vietnam-coded war camp. Enemy soldiers regularly volunteer to greet you foot-to-face as you send them flying backwards with a satisfying crash sound, while other lines of enemies parade on-screen, turn around to throw a knife nowhere near you, and walk off again. You can duck into rooms or trucks in the background to fight a handful of slightly stronger enemies. Beating them rewards power-ups like punch-enhancing brass knuckles or bullet-blocking body armor. Each level ends with a boss that will either be extremely easy or extremely cheap depending on how the RNG is feeling. Rinse, repeat, escape.
There's really not much else to the experience P.O.W. offers. Environments are nicely detailed, playing on a sort of "fake 3D" incline that offers some nice perspective. The music is a real standout, providing some head-bobbing underscore as you punch your 500th identical enemy. The chance for an enemy to drop their knife or machine gun gives you the opportunity to turn their weapons against them in a very satisfying, one-hit-kill deluge of screen-clearing fire (provided you line it up properly). Combat can be challenging if enemies surround you, but 9 times out of 10 you'll be stunlocking every enemy you encounter, oftentimes catching up to 3 enemies at once in the same flurry of punches and kicks.
Being a home-version of an arcade game, there are a few cheap deaths waiting for unsuspecting players. Taking a bullet or touching an explosion is a one-hit-kill, and one boss in particular makes use of both techniques as his only 2 attacks completely at random. Enemies will sometimes spam attacks if you are standing just above or below them, so a fair amount of combat is about disengaging so enemy pathfinding forces them to break out of their animations. A sequence involving flamethrower enemies is most survivable by tying a blindfold to your face and just praying while mashing jump-kicks.
The real trouble (and it's costing this game rating an entire star) is the final boss, who is genuinely broken. This is not an issue of fight design, it's busted programming. The boss moves with you horizontally 1-to-1, matching your inputs exactly, preventing you from closing the gap without pushing him against the edge of the screen. Worse than that, though, is his attack range seems to be roughly twice the size of his sprite distance, so there's no way to know whether your position is safe in the first place. The absolute worst, however, is his attack deals damage to you before the animation plays. The boss slides up to you, you fall backwards as you lose half your health, and then you see the attack animation play. Beating him is entirely arbitrary, and ends the game on a low note when it had been a perfectly serviceable beat em up right up until that moment.
The one saving grace around these issues is the inclusion of infinite continues. Continues start you at the beginning of each level, but in the case of the final boss, it's a very short hike to get another run at his broken nonsense. In a generation of games filled with limited continues and cheap deaths, it's a shockingly refreshing and empowering inclusion, especially as the checkpoints in the final level feel extremely fair. If you manage to power through to the end and escape, then, as the game says, "congraturation!"
There's really not much else to the experience P.O.W. offers. Environments are nicely detailed, playing on a sort of "fake 3D" incline that offers some nice perspective. The music is a real standout, providing some head-bobbing underscore as you punch your 500th identical enemy. The chance for an enemy to drop their knife or machine gun gives you the opportunity to turn their weapons against them in a very satisfying, one-hit-kill deluge of screen-clearing fire (provided you line it up properly). Combat can be challenging if enemies surround you, but 9 times out of 10 you'll be stunlocking every enemy you encounter, oftentimes catching up to 3 enemies at once in the same flurry of punches and kicks.
Being a home-version of an arcade game, there are a few cheap deaths waiting for unsuspecting players. Taking a bullet or touching an explosion is a one-hit-kill, and one boss in particular makes use of both techniques as his only 2 attacks completely at random. Enemies will sometimes spam attacks if you are standing just above or below them, so a fair amount of combat is about disengaging so enemy pathfinding forces them to break out of their animations. A sequence involving flamethrower enemies is most survivable by tying a blindfold to your face and just praying while mashing jump-kicks.
The real trouble (and it's costing this game rating an entire star) is the final boss, who is genuinely broken. This is not an issue of fight design, it's busted programming. The boss moves with you horizontally 1-to-1, matching your inputs exactly, preventing you from closing the gap without pushing him against the edge of the screen. Worse than that, though, is his attack range seems to be roughly twice the size of his sprite distance, so there's no way to know whether your position is safe in the first place. The absolute worst, however, is his attack deals damage to you before the animation plays. The boss slides up to you, you fall backwards as you lose half your health, and then you see the attack animation play. Beating him is entirely arbitrary, and ends the game on a low note when it had been a perfectly serviceable beat em up right up until that moment.
The one saving grace around these issues is the inclusion of infinite continues. Continues start you at the beginning of each level, but in the case of the final boss, it's a very short hike to get another run at his broken nonsense. In a generation of games filled with limited continues and cheap deaths, it's a shockingly refreshing and empowering inclusion, especially as the checkpoints in the final level feel extremely fair. If you manage to power through to the end and escape, then, as the game says, "congraturation!"