Review: PO’ed: Definitive Edition

When Nightdive Studios announced that they’d be remastering PO’ed, I thought they were joking. It was April 1st, and they posted a trailer that starts off rather deceptively. But here it is. I’m not sure I really wanted to play PO’ed, but now I’ve played all of it.

PO’ed was initially released in 1995 on the doomed 3DO Interactive Multiplayer before getting a 1996 port on PlayStation. The first-person shooter genre was still in its infancy, and while these early years resulted in classics like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, it’s also a graveyard for countless others that are now largely forgotten. If it isn’t obvious, PO’ed belongs in the latter category.

I hadn’t played it before. There was a copy in one of those early-PS1 cardboard longboxes in the basement of the game store I briefly ran, and I didn’t touch it. There was probably a reason it was in the basement (my guess is disc rot), and I wasn’t that curious. However, reviews at the time of its release weren’t terrible. Though, they probably should have been.

PO’ed: Definitive Edition (PC [Reviewed], Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Any Channel, Nightdive Studios
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Released: May 16, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

PO’ed has enough going for it to separate itself from the pack of FPS games that were coming out at the time. Notably, using the SlaveDriver Engine, it was much better at 3D environments, even though they were incredibly basic. It’s also a lot weirder with the default weapon being a frying pan, a chef protagonist, and walking butts for enemies.

The story involves Ox, the protagonist, being stranded out in the furthest reaches of space where the locals are hostile. There isn’t much storytelling within the game itself, so it’s not too far off from many FPS games at the time, right down to the abstract environments.

But the level design is a lot different than much of what you’d see at the time. Environments are often huge, open areas. Much of the time, you get around with the help of a jetpack. It’s actually rather impressive, since corridors were the main locale for a lot of ‘90s gunfights. Nevermind that a lot of the surfaces are just flat-shaded, at least we aren’t looking at dirty walls.

Having large environments meant that the developers were delving into some unexplored territory, and while I’d argue that there’s a decent amount of talent on display in PO’ed, it doesn’t really coalesce in an enjoyable way.

The goal of every level is to simply find the teleporter out of it, but they needed to make that a challenge somehow. Often, this means that you’re scouring through maze-like environments looking for the damned thing, but then there are others where the goal is not so clear. Sometimes you have to kill all the enemies in the area, and other times you need to activate a series of switches to make it through.

The maze-like environments are bad enough. As I said, a lot of the textures are just flat colors. This can get extremely disorienting, especially when you add PO’ed’s penchant for verticality. I never really got stuck, but I think that was largely just luck. However, I was often uncomfortable, and regularly very confused. Sometimes I would trip over the teleporter’s location within moments of starting a level and of the game’s three secret levels, I found two of them by complete mistake.

I didn’t want to find these secret levels. The normal levels were painful enough, that I didn’t want to extend it any further. They were the first warm teleporters I found to cuddle up to, and they betrayed me.

I found myself comparing PO’ed to William Shatner’s TekWar for much of the game’s runtime. TekWar also liked to experiment with open environments. But most starkly, they both have the same approach to difficulty balancing.

Since many of the levels are large, open areas, this can mean a lot of enemies are constantly shooting at you from all directions. The worst are any sort of flying foe, because they are extremely difficult to hit on medium settings. Even if you stay mobile and fly around with your jetpack, you’re going to take a lot of hits. There’s not much choice to it, damage will happen.

So, to offset this, PO’ed gives you a massive health bar and dumps healing items in stacks all over the place. In order to make later levels more difficult, they just reduce how many stacks of health kits they provide. I mean, that works, it’s just the least well-thought-out and elegant way to do it. It also means that the screen flashes a lot and your dude keeps grunting. It’s not a very fun experience.

Speaking of sounds, there’s barely any music. I had to check to make sure it wasn’t just a bug that prevented music from playing during levels, but there really isn’t any.

The Definitive Edition is inarguably the best way to experience PO’ed. Its transition to the KEX Engine means it’s capable of higher resolutions and interpolation to smooth out movement. It also means mouse-look, which wasn’t possible on the 3DO or PS1.

Nightdive did a decent job of upgrading PO’ed. They didn’t go all the way with it like they did with some previous titles. I asked Director of Business Development Larry Kuperman if they updated the art in any way. “Yes, to the art,” he said. “Tweaked more than redone.” He also said, “Not sure I want to compare what we did for PO’ed to anything close to Dark Forces, Zoey.”

So, in comparison to the Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster, it’s not quite as overhauled. Enemy sprites are still low-resolution mashes of pixels. There weren’t really any cutscenes to redo, either. It’s largely “just” a source port, but it still does wonders for the game. But considering that PO’ed isn’t a guaranteed seller like a game with the Star Wars name on it, it’s not surprising they didn’t give it a complete facelift.

The best thing I can say about PO’ed is that it can be completed in around three hours. Aside from that, I really didn’t enjoy it. It’s not the worst FPS I’ve played. For all its problems, it at least isn’t bland. It has its high points, demonstrates a capable development team with a willingness to experiment, it just didn’t result in a fun final product.

I also must commend Nightdive Studios for having the guts to remaster a game that can’t even claim a cult following. PO’ed isn’t notoriously bad, but it would probably be better if it was. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it come up in conversation. I might never have played it had it not been for Nightdive, and for that, I’m grateful in a very strange way. Even if a game is obscure or outright bad, I always love seeing them get dusted off and restored to working order. I just never want to play it again.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}