After beating Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn I knew I had to go check out the other SlaveDriver Engine games, and given the recent release of PowerSlave Exhumed, the Sega Saturn original seemed like a great place to start.
In a lot of ways PowerSlave plays it pretty close to the Boomer Shooter formula: run around levels gibbing enemies with increasingly ludicrous weapons while collecting keys. If reduced solely to that, PowerSlave still plays damn good. In fact, the momentum feels better here than in Lobotomy Software's Duke port, and shots line up perfectly as long as your aim on the x-axis is true (which Duke 3D was a bit finicky with.) But PowerSlave doesn't adhere strictly to convention. Perhaps the way it departs the most from its contemporaries is by melding search-action elements to level progression.
As you make your way through PowerSlave you'll acquire different skills that modify the way you traverse a level, opening previously inaccessible routes that lead to new exits and thus to new levels. For example, you might find a long stretch of poisonous ground in one level that cannot be walked across for long before you die. Returning later with sandals that negate poison damage will allow you to navigate through towards a new exit which then branches out into several new levels. This never becomes too complicated and in fact I never found myself lost or unsure of which level I should head back to next.
The world map will also have a few levels that emit beeping sounds, signaling the presence of a transmitter piece. There's eight in all and collecting them is required for the good ending. Some of these are pretty easy to stumble across but others will require a bit of thinking and skilled platforming. Oh yeah, there's a lot of that in this game. If you're like me you probably hate the idea of platforming puzzles in a first person game, but PowerSlave generally feels good with only a few sections causing me any real amount of frustration.
The same can be said of the game's difficulty in general, which is ramped up at a good even pace. Weapons also feel terrific with each having a clear utility for the challenges you're about to face. By the end of the game you feel appropriately powerful, and to draw another comparison to Duke Nukem 3D, the final boss feels like a satisfying cakewalk as you go absolutely hog on him with the weapons you picked up along the way.
So I seem very positive on PowerSlave so far. Why the 3.5 out of 5?
There are a couple notable levels that I spent entirely too long on due to irritating design choices that feel incredibly out of place given the rest of the game's quality: Magma Fields and The Sunken Palace of Khnum. The former is a literal "the floor is fire" level, but you're saddled with so much to deal with that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The platforming is hard enough here but everything else that's thrown your way pushes things a little too far for my liking, coming across as overly difficult in contrast to the "tough but fair" nature of the end game.
The Sunken Palace, on the other hand, is far worse and teeters into "time to quit the game" territory. I'm not sure who designed this or what was going through their mind, but it's hands down one of the worst water levels I've come across in a long time. Much of the level is spent navigating underwater caverns littered with mines that have too generous of a blast radius. You're only able to use three weapons underwater to disarm them: you machete (which is obviously a terrible idea), grenades, or your magic staff. If you're just a hair too close the grenades can cause you to take blowback damage, and the staff's projectile weaves around, making it less than ideal in a few spots. It also can cause blowback damage, so I relied mostly on the grenades. You have to contend with piranhas during all of this, and if you get ganged up on by them they'll melt your health bar in seconds. Whacking them with your machete is an option, but feels clumsy and won't do you much good if you're dealing with a swarm.
Alternatively, you can pitch the camera down while you're floating above water and aim at mines and piranhas with your guns. This is a bit slow but honestly the safest way to go through the level, though this really only works in a few locations with the rest only accessible while submerged. Also the piranhas like to get underneath you and bop your character around which is incredibly annoying. At the end of all of this is one last key you must collect and immediately weave into a corridor before all the doors in the room close on you, trapping you inside and leaving you to drown. The game doesn't really telegraph this, so I fell for it my first time. This is perhaps the one part of the game where PowerSlave feels outright unfair, and placing the trap at the very end of an already frustrating level is garbage. You've been warned now, at least.
There's some other issues I have here and there. Lasers killing you in one hit makes navigating some very late game areas a pain. Like Duke Nukem 3D (can you tell what game I played right before this?) the lack of check-pointing can make later levels a bit of a slog when you keep biting it right at the end. Thankfully this is an area the Exhumed edition improves upon. A more stable framerate also helps, and a better draw distance and texture clarity makes it a whole lot easier to see what's going on and where you're heading. Again, if you have your choice of versions, Exhumed is the way to go.
There's a lot of good here, Lobotomy just got so much right with PowerSlave, but a few bizarre choices makes it stop just short of being better than their Duke 3D port. It's not that the bad outweighs the good so much as the good makes the bad even more apparent.
In a lot of ways PowerSlave plays it pretty close to the Boomer Shooter formula: run around levels gibbing enemies with increasingly ludicrous weapons while collecting keys. If reduced solely to that, PowerSlave still plays damn good. In fact, the momentum feels better here than in Lobotomy Software's Duke port, and shots line up perfectly as long as your aim on the x-axis is true (which Duke 3D was a bit finicky with.) But PowerSlave doesn't adhere strictly to convention. Perhaps the way it departs the most from its contemporaries is by melding search-action elements to level progression.
As you make your way through PowerSlave you'll acquire different skills that modify the way you traverse a level, opening previously inaccessible routes that lead to new exits and thus to new levels. For example, you might find a long stretch of poisonous ground in one level that cannot be walked across for long before you die. Returning later with sandals that negate poison damage will allow you to navigate through towards a new exit which then branches out into several new levels. This never becomes too complicated and in fact I never found myself lost or unsure of which level I should head back to next.
The world map will also have a few levels that emit beeping sounds, signaling the presence of a transmitter piece. There's eight in all and collecting them is required for the good ending. Some of these are pretty easy to stumble across but others will require a bit of thinking and skilled platforming. Oh yeah, there's a lot of that in this game. If you're like me you probably hate the idea of platforming puzzles in a first person game, but PowerSlave generally feels good with only a few sections causing me any real amount of frustration.
The same can be said of the game's difficulty in general, which is ramped up at a good even pace. Weapons also feel terrific with each having a clear utility for the challenges you're about to face. By the end of the game you feel appropriately powerful, and to draw another comparison to Duke Nukem 3D, the final boss feels like a satisfying cakewalk as you go absolutely hog on him with the weapons you picked up along the way.
So I seem very positive on PowerSlave so far. Why the 3.5 out of 5?
There are a couple notable levels that I spent entirely too long on due to irritating design choices that feel incredibly out of place given the rest of the game's quality: Magma Fields and The Sunken Palace of Khnum. The former is a literal "the floor is fire" level, but you're saddled with so much to deal with that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The platforming is hard enough here but everything else that's thrown your way pushes things a little too far for my liking, coming across as overly difficult in contrast to the "tough but fair" nature of the end game.
The Sunken Palace, on the other hand, is far worse and teeters into "time to quit the game" territory. I'm not sure who designed this or what was going through their mind, but it's hands down one of the worst water levels I've come across in a long time. Much of the level is spent navigating underwater caverns littered with mines that have too generous of a blast radius. You're only able to use three weapons underwater to disarm them: you machete (which is obviously a terrible idea), grenades, or your magic staff. If you're just a hair too close the grenades can cause you to take blowback damage, and the staff's projectile weaves around, making it less than ideal in a few spots. It also can cause blowback damage, so I relied mostly on the grenades. You have to contend with piranhas during all of this, and if you get ganged up on by them they'll melt your health bar in seconds. Whacking them with your machete is an option, but feels clumsy and won't do you much good if you're dealing with a swarm.
Alternatively, you can pitch the camera down while you're floating above water and aim at mines and piranhas with your guns. This is a bit slow but honestly the safest way to go through the level, though this really only works in a few locations with the rest only accessible while submerged. Also the piranhas like to get underneath you and bop your character around which is incredibly annoying. At the end of all of this is one last key you must collect and immediately weave into a corridor before all the doors in the room close on you, trapping you inside and leaving you to drown. The game doesn't really telegraph this, so I fell for it my first time. This is perhaps the one part of the game where PowerSlave feels outright unfair, and placing the trap at the very end of an already frustrating level is garbage. You've been warned now, at least.
There's some other issues I have here and there. Lasers killing you in one hit makes navigating some very late game areas a pain. Like Duke Nukem 3D (can you tell what game I played right before this?) the lack of check-pointing can make later levels a bit of a slog when you keep biting it right at the end. Thankfully this is an area the Exhumed edition improves upon. A more stable framerate also helps, and a better draw distance and texture clarity makes it a whole lot easier to see what's going on and where you're heading. Again, if you have your choice of versions, Exhumed is the way to go.
There's a lot of good here, Lobotomy just got so much right with PowerSlave, but a few bizarre choices makes it stop just short of being better than their Duke 3D port. It's not that the bad outweighs the good so much as the good makes the bad even more apparent.