PowerSlave Exhumed Is The Best Game You've Never Played

 Powerslave is one of the most underrated first person shooters of all time. This is a game originally released in 1996 and developed by lobotomy software centering around the player taking on the role of an evil soldier sent to the ancient Egyptian city of Karnak, and soon after you learn that an alien race called the kilmart is trying to resurrect King Ramses and suck his power for its own nefarious purposes and its a really interesting game i think for many reasons starting with how confusing the title can be i mean its either called powerslave exhumed or what the japanese call it sarah k 1999 pharaoh no fukatsu stop ask for help anyway this is now the latest in a long line of remasters from night dive studios coming out right after they probably finished counting the money they made off of this earthquake remaster and i think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't played in the original and still doesn't speak fondly of it to this day, I mean there's a reason why some versions of this game are t how expensive on ebay and it's not because of this cover up believe me a few years ago i made a video on powerslave ex which is kinda similar but this time the difference is that powerslave exhumed is actually an official amalgamation of items from all the different ports of the original game and adding some quality of life inclusions along the way as you can see three major versions of this game have been released there is a pc version which is more or less just a pretty standard first person shooter running on the build engine yes the same build engine that powered games like duke nukem 3d shadow warrior blood and witchhaven 2. it has some pretty cool gear items and fun level design but it's really more or less just search for keys, complete dozens of levels and on the other hand you have console versions for both sega saturn, as well as the playstation, what's going on with my voice, man

overall i would never really say that consoles are the best version as i believe each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses and looking at them from side to side there are actually quite big differences, not so in in both games you start with a machete which is mostly used underwater to deal with the legions of piranhas waiting for you and then you get both a revolver and an M60 machine gun and actually on the pc both had to be reloaded if you look closely this sprite is a gun M60 when you fire it you will actually see the ammo bar getting smaller as you get close to needing to reload on the playstation saturn you can just shoot both of these bad boys until you run out of ammo instead of enough standard grenade on PC the console had this thing called a moon bomb that exploded on impact as opposed to a delayed fuse, not to mention e was also necessary to destroy weakened walls this is much more useful in gameplay now both versions share the flamethrower and the staff of the serpent and although the sprites are different they are more or less the same now I guess I don't need to explain what a flamethrower is and what there is a snake basically just a rocket launcher with the secret of heat yeah heat seeking and rocket launchers are two things that always complement each other then on consoles you have the ra ring and the holy handcuff the ring shoots all those bouncing bullets that turn the screen into pixels

a nightmare but it's quite an effective weapon if you want to cover the room with a bunch of bouncy look and kill anything that moves then this holy manacle fires charged lightning on the pc even though you had none of it just given something called ira which was a gauntlet that summoned a thundercloud to drop lightning bolts on enemies which almost reminded me of those flying koops in Super Mario Brothers, now more than the PC version used red chalices to restore health and then blue chalices to restore your power, which was needed to use all gear items like invulnerability, invisibility and bonus damage, consoles just used these generic blue and red weapon health and health upgrades, with the catch being that they were only applied to whatever weapon you had equipped compared to more traditional PC ammo boxes that were specific to each o weapon type savvy so on consoles you can even extend your max um health points by picking up these hidden bitches basically giving you up to five health bars to burn while pc just had an old school life system so i guess the main difference overall is that in the console port you really felt like you were getting stronger as a character, but on pc you just found bigger and better weapons and items, i mean it's not bad but it really highlights how different the two versions are. I think what's even more interesting is that on PC your character is a lot louder which is right pouring out all those one-liners during combat and I think my favorites probably like his sinister little laugh he does after you use of these mummies this is around the time duke nukem low wang a caleb ruled the roost and it was almost a cardinal scene not to include a group of one lioness that would fit your rough male protagonist i.e. on console vs. he was

basically the mute also sort of comes together, also i think the pc version feels a lot grittier like there are a lot more gruesome elements you'll come across and the boss fights while they are visually the same are also a bit different i mean this one against the set for example all these souls come out screaming from his bloody corpse and this man's side is just gnarled there are some gruesome death animations too for a standard one you'll just see how all that blood it's pouring out of your guts but if you die like an explosion you'll even see the flesh stripped off your arms if you run out of life it also ends up being one of the most traumatizing screen games I've ever seen look at this man it's goddamn stuff and nightmares , i should also mention how amazing the soundtrack is in both of these games, there are only about half a dozen tracks in total but those get stuck in your head very quickly and they're always nice they seem to be level-appropriate, ie the music you'll hear in these combat-heavy levels is completely different from what you'll hear floating around in these empty sunken tunnels of a sunken temple

the waffle about all this is if you're hoping for some kind of resurrection of the pc version well i hate to be the harbinger of bad news but it's not like fans of the console version can stop smiling and fall off their sheets though because this is a fairly faithful adaptation of the saturn and playstation 1 versions for the pc, of course the main advantage of this remaster is the ability to play the whole thing in a much higher resolution and smoother controls, i mean trying to aim up and down for example in the playstation version was just incredibly clunky and I mean looking at the old versions vs the new version the difference is just stunning there is definitely still something appealing about playing these old consoles and I am really addicted to this dithering effect on the Playstation 1 but playing it now in high fidelity it really lets artistry come through now with things like geometry in architecture oh it defines tel y isn't as detailed as the PC version, but it's still damn good for its time considering the capabilities and limitations of what

effort put into it there's even an option to turn on the crosshair not that it's all that necessary because the automation in this thing is fucking dirty but again hey it's there but I think the really interesting thing the exhumed powerslave did is combine elements from both the sega saturn and the playstation version and in some ways it's also a little improved like now the layouts of some levels while still the same have actually been extended to be less claustrophobic even from the first level in karnak environment it feels a lot more open now so it feels less restrictive and also allows for a much greater range of motion you really notice this throughout the remaster where it looks like they've kept the feel of the level itself but just widened it a bit to give you a little more places to fight, enemies from both versions are now also connected like spiders and scorpions, now it was originally saturn and compu ter i had spiders then playstation with scorpions but now it's just one big gang bang and all these guys are invited to be honest though i'm not particularly worried about it i mean both spiders and scorpions can burn in hell for all i care and i will never forgive the scorpions what they did to the anti in honey i shrunk the kids and don't start about the wasps too though at least the wasps in this one aren't even half as annoying as the pc version anyway except this still fetches sprites from pc to make it even more confusing like serpentine staff use sprite on pc unlike ps1 or saturn there was always something fun about sprite work in these games and the way enemies often they would just explode when they were killed and it's actually pretty cool now to see these new death animations enabled so now they'll only explode if you use the right weapon these are a few things i'm nk this re master just objectively improves one of them being platformer sections that are like day and night compared to the consoles i've finished

it's a few times on playstation and while i wouldn't say the platformer is super hard it is definitely hard with a controller, a lot of the difficulty can be worked around with items like a scarf and a feather which give you quite a margin of error but there are also sequences where you have to like to slide down these super deep pits along with dodging enemies and it can often be quite difficult to balance both the platforming and the threats of these nearby enemies well on a computer you don't have to worry about it and the mouse and keyboard setup makes that sections are a piece of a piece there is a level called the sunken temple and you probably know what you are there for yes it is obviously the whole temple under water and I really didn't enjoy playing this thing again because on console it's almost as fun as waterboarding which funny is basically what you put your character in the game at first i feared i was horrified but it turned out I found that with the improved controls it was a lot easier so now I can actually worry more about the puzzle and exploration aspect and less about basic navigation or struggling to get back to the surface for some much needed fresh air and coupled with this laid back piece of music was like I'm resting in an isolation tank or something

do the whole thing over again seriously if you touch a single lava pixel and you don't have the wedding rings you will die instantly no matter how much health you have this version seems to fix that placing a weird checkpoint here and there usually before is really hard section so you don't feel like a sucker punched in the throat anymore there is a bit in one of the later levels where you have to walk down this pit which has lava on all sides and then when you reach the bottom defeat the three mage praying mantis enemies that are those creatures that pop out of lava and shoot fireballs you originally had to do everything in one go and as you'd expect it was pretty hard these guys could literally pop out of any direction and trying to deal with all three at once can be pretty darn hard , now in the remaster they put a checkpoint at the beginning of this fight, saving you from having to go through the whole thing all over again and over and over again and it's minor tweaks like this I don't think it makes the game any easier but it just mitigates some of the unnecessary replay in the kind of sections you already beat oh and that infamous hidden laser field you know this one which i am talking about there is also a checkpoint just before that but if you really want to keep that chest hair good news you can even disable these checkpoints in the game options its still ok although it wont make Power Slave less demanding in actually in two pretty big ways, they actually made it even harder with the addition of these two new hard and wheelbarrow modes not only does it increase the enemy counter but honestly it seems to be about double it also increases the damage done by the enemies yeah , good rubber drops pharaoh mode is also a bit like quake nightmare mode increasing the speed at which enemies shoot as you know in case the increased damage the tests weren't enough d you'll need a combination of some serious patience and some serious cojones to beat the game on this difficulty i mean some of the later ones

the levels against the kill mart are the kind of things that really build character and to put it mildly i'm a bit on the verge of these new difficulties would i recommend them just because it's not like their official modes added by lobotomy software or something like that right now . I usually choose hard modes when I play games. i think if the game is fun in hard mode, that's usually a good indication that the game was well designed. I mean if you can really understand and learn from how you were defeated it gives you a sense of progression as a player you know what I mean is why I think I enjoy doing motherhood so much and why nightmare difficulty has become the norm for many gamers including me but i feel like the hard mode in this is really aimed at people who are already familiar with the base game and i would definitely not recommend it for a first playthrough and i mean even though i know the game quite well, I still had hard times here and there and almost considered starting over by the way and I think the main reason for this is the rng system which is in charge of treating health and ammo properly so like I said before unlike the pc version , the console versions use health powers and ammo which either drop from enemies when they are killed or can be found in containers but they are completely random so you are always on your own and the grace of what the game will give you and the game doesn't discriminate if you need one of them you know i mean you can have full health and no ammo but all upgrades will still be health upgrades to make you even better sometimes in there will be traps in these containers that shoot these homing projectiles that do a lot of damage to him" It's just a shame the remaster couldn't balance this somehow, resulting in sections where you won't have ammo but

then heaps of health or you know vice versa it forces you to go back to early levels then farm those health buffs and ammo which honestly was a pretty big aspect of the original like i said i guess i hope it just worked out im a little better off offsetting these improvements. The other thing I think is how player hitboxes work and if you are used to how hitboxes are in something like Doom Quake or Duke Nukem 3dr well then you are in for quite a shock when you play this let's see it in an instant replay because it feels like you're playing as a guy who has basketball-sized deltoids or something and it's like you're taking the punches you feel like I should have avoided that but again though yeah that was an aspect of the original games so if anything then maybe i should praise him for being moved so faithfully its ok though extreme power slavery is a fairly easy recommendation i have often been accused of being a shield and i will also sell my body for a piece of soft cheese, but you know what if i'm a shelf for suggesting people to go and play this very affordable remaster of one of the best fps games no one played well so pin the cage to my or zechów and call ja shield is just a classic experience that comes from a time when only a handful of people were needed to create a game who were really passionate and dedicated to their craft look at all the behind the scenes photos of the developer team from that time and it really is it's like a glimpse into a bygone era and I think it's the energy and vibe that is still felt now in 2022 with unlockable achievements and 31 hidden dolls defined along with a campaign to master in pharaoh mode is a good deal of the value to have here now if only night diving could give the alien trilogy the same treatment then i would die a happy man