6. Powerslave/Exhumed (PS1)
Build engine shooters styled after Doom were the modern military shooters of the mid-to-late nineties. It became increasingly common for such games to have RPG elements and a non-linear structure, and one of the better examples of this type of game is Exhumed. Exhumed was an Egyptian mythology take on the 90s, and featured a Metroidvanian style of upgrade and exploration system. It was actually pretty fun. But unfortunately Powerslave was still a build FPS, and thus extremely ugly. Consider the fact that it was released in 1996/7 and featured flat sprites, when during that period shooters that used proper 3D models (Quake and Goldeneye) were being released. To make matters worse, the art direction in Powerslave took a semi-realistic approach similar to Duke Nukem 3D so that all the enemies ending up blurry and pixelated: a problem common among such games, but at least Doom and Blood have retained a charmingly cartoony appeal. I tried playing Powerslave the other week, but just couldnt get past the terrible resolution. The other problem Powerslave suffered from was its horrible environments. Whilst it had some of the best 3D levels to grace a build engine game, the actual aesthetics are quite simply bland and repetitive; I understand that the setting is somewhat limiting, but it doesn't excuse the lazy, uninspired level design. The levels become increasingly detailed as you progress (alien structures, volcanoes etc) but youll spend the majority of the game exploring uninteresting generic brown locales; like Indiana Jones on one of his less exciting adventures.