If you’re of a certain vintage and find that even after reaching back into the deepest recesses of your mind that you still can’t remember what PO’ed was, I cannot entirely blame you. Originally released on the doomed 3DO console all the way back in 1995, PO’ed existed at a time when the idea of the first-person shooter hadn’t quite crystallised yet. Call of Duty was at least eight years away at this point and while ‘classic’ DOOM had been and gone, the genre was still going through some evolutionary growing pains.
As such, the door was open to experimentation of all kinds and though the game was poorly received in its day, PO’ed nonetheless walked through that door and struck out for more colorful horizons, supplying a new cadre of thirsty shooter fans with a funky setting filled with wacky weapons, outrageous enemies and more importantly, the sort of focus on vertically flavoured level design that the genre just hadn’t seen up until that point.
PO’ed: Definitive Edition PS5 Review
An Oft Forgotten 90s FPS That’s As Rough As It Is Oddly Innovative
Arguably more confusing than any facet of PO’ed itself is its utterly unexpected resurrection on PlayStation consoles some twenty-nine years after its original release. Certainly the most unlikely remaster ever, thanks in no small part to the double-header of its obscurity and shall we say questionable critical merits, PO’ed: Definitive Edition brings a shooter back from the veritable abyss for an all-new generation of gamers to enjoy.
While I don’t see PO’ed: Definitive Edition necessarily doing gangbusters for Nightdive Studios as a result, it’s still immensely heartening to see something like this greenlit in an industry where publishers and developers are becoming seemingly more risk averse by the day. Furthermore, the existence of PO’ed: Definitive Edition clearly illustrates that quite literally nothing is off the table for Nightdive Studios in terms of potential projects that could get the remaster treatment in the future. Which is, you know, great and stuff.
Taking place aboard a spaceship floating in the cosmos, PO’ed casts players as a moderately deranged space chef who is looking to escape his current dire circumstances as he finds himself under attack from all manner of unsavoury intergalactic beasties which include bipedal butt-monsters that fire out great globs of poop at you to thong-bound aliens with plasma cannons for arms and much more besides. Put simply, PO’ed is what would happen if mid-1990s MTV decided to conjure up a studio from the ether and fart out an FPS.
Despite its oddball extravagances and surprising innovations (which I’ll touch on shortly), PO’ed would seem to follow a fairly familiar iteration of the classic FPS design template. This means you’ll be carving your way through the beginning of the map to the end of it, flick some switches along the way and maybe discovering the odd secret, all the while you collect much needed health and ammo pickups to keep yourself going as you blast your way through an increasingly grotesque cast of bad dudes.
You also have something of an unconventional arsenal to deal with these critters. From a frying pan and an infinitely replenishing collection of meat cleavers (our dude *is* a chef, after all), to drills, laser guns and more, PO’ed doesn’t skimp on the weapons you have at your disposal. What is frustrating however is that outside of the frying pan (which you start the game with), all of the weapons in game just utterly lack any real kind of oomph and just doesn’t feel satisfying to wield at all.
In addition to there being no real story or objectives, PO’ed also doesn’t have anything approaching a decent audiovisual presentation. Sure, while it’s nice to play the game in razor sharp native 4K and buttery smooth 120 frames per second (pointedly, PO’ed: Definitive Edition is one of the very few games to support this combo, so bravo to Nightdive Studios for that), the blocky, sprite-based enemies with their limited frames of animation coupled with a lack of textures for the floor and ceilings of each map, hardly make PO’ed: Definitive Edition a treat for the eyes. Oh. and there’s not really any music either – and for some reason when you pull off a backflip to quickly turn around, our hero shouts like he’s Temu Bruce Lee or something. Just awful really.
However, if you can peer beyond the veneer of its gross-out ‘humour’ and unrefined aesthetic, PO’ed is actually a fairly clever and innovative shooter in some ways. Chiefly, this innovation manifests itself in PO’ed’s level design which is predicated on verticality with towering maps that have an array of platforms stacked on top of one another.
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This invariably means that you’ll spend a chunk of time not just hopping from one platform to another, but flying around these towering structures too – thanks in no small part to a handy, jet fuelled backpack that you’ll pick up early on. Of course, while these big open spaces are cool to fly around and do genuinely make PO’ed feel somewhat removed from the status quo of shooters at the time it was originally made, such levels can often see barren, empty at times and even unfinished, hinting at a game where undisciplined design is very much threaded through every aspect of its DNA.
PO’ed: Definitive Edition then is very much a warts ‘n’ all shooter and always has been (perhaps with more emphasis on the ‘warts’, than the ‘all’) but despite the fact that it is a flawed and limited shooter, there are still light shafts of promise thanks to its unconventional setting, not to mention the relatively innovative level design with its focus on verticality.
PO’ed: Definitive Edition is essentially a 5/10 game from 1995 given the 8/10 remaster treatment. And while that seems like damning with faint, practically incorporeal praise, I’m happy that it has been brought back from the abyss of obscurity as it not only allows players to peek at the FPS genre at large during its more formative, experimental period, but so too does it reinforce the notion that developer Nightdive Studios is perhaps the least risk averse developer in the industry today and that essentially nothing is off the table for the impressive studio and its ongoing remastering and remaking aspirations.
PO’ed: Definitive Edition is out now on PS4 & PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.