As Eurogamer’s technology editor and founder of Digital Foundry, it’s fair to say that my focus is usually on the future of gaming, not the past. For many, retro gaming is a voyage of discovery and delight, but for me, it’s part of a 30-year-long career. With that in mind, few games retain a vice-like grip on my affections decades on from release – but Lobotomy Software’s PowerSlave (or Exhumed as I knew it at launch) is a game for the ages. For me, it’s up there with Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D as one of the greatest shooters of the 90s – and now it’s back on all modern platforms, thanks to an astonishing remaster from Nightdive Studios. Skip ahead to the video below to see just how wonderful the remastering work is or jump ahead once more to see John Linneman’s original DF Retro episode on the title: see an expert deconstruction of what made this game so special.
The bottom line is that PowerSlave Exhumed was the cream of the crop from the 90s ‘Doom clone’ explosion, a game that actually manifested in three different forms: an interesting but not exactly brilliant PC game designed on 3D Realms’ Build engine, followed up by two custom console versions that were very, very different, both using Lobotomy Software’s own SlaveDriver engine.
