/vr/ - Retro Games

It took a few levels for it to really hit its stride, but I'm pretty impressed with Build Powerslave. In terms of mechanics and design, it's not far behind Duke and Shadow Warrior at all. They designed this game for continuous play and it shows, with inventory mechanics that discourage hoarding and also prevent you from just stacking all the buffs any time there's a rough fight, as well as relatively small ammo amounts and capacities so you're never running around with full ammo for everything. The weapons are serviceable in both function and feeling. They definitely put extra effort into the M60 knowing that it'd be your workhorse, but none of the others are particularly bad. The enemy roster's solid too. There's little to no redundancy and the enemies all have distinguishable silhouettes, but some of them are a bit disproportionately strong for how they're used. The mummies can be especially nasty in groups, they're like the classic Archvile+Revenant encounter rolled into one enemy.

Worst I can say about the game is that it's lacking in character. Our guy doesn't have much to say and the few lines he has aren't particularly good. The setting also doesn't really allow for the same amount of humor in the levels. The best you get are rude traps and occasional secret windows into rooms with sexy ladies. It's only really a problem though because of the expectation set by the main trio.