I have played a few FPS in my days, not too many, but sure as hell i never played PO’ED, never even heard of the frigging thing until the AVGN episode about the 3DO, to be honest, as i never knew anyone growing up that had that thing (which i assume is the case for almost everyone else), and i never even stumbled upon the PS1 port.
So i was curious, realized that Nightdive did actually do a remaster in their KEX engine for this oscure mid 90s FPS, and i got during a PSN sale.
It just called to me, as the forgotten weird ass FPS where you play as a chef and use frying pan to kill alien ass monsters, i knew i had to play it.
The story is all explained in a letter text dump where the protagonist, a chef named Ox, writes to his mum how that sweet paying gig on a spaceship …didn’t go as planned, as aliens infiltrated the ship, killed all the mercs, so he’ll have to take on some fresh meat.
And he’s indeed – title drop – Pissed Off, as he writes in the few text scrolls/letters.
Again, it was 1995, so don’t expect much in terms of story, or even in cohesive enviromental storytelling, as i’m not even sure if we crashlanded on an alien planet or we are using portals, as every few levels (every act/chapter i assume) we’re back on the ship now crawling with other enemies and with a new portal for each act active. Not that it matters, it really doesn’t.
Originally developed by Any Channel, for the 3DO, PO’ED is indeed the FPS equivalent of some weird B-movie you’d catch late at night on TV only to forget about it, and years later find out it has became a cult hit of sorts, rescued back from complete obscurity, given a 2K restoration and yet still the freaky weird shit you’d remember it as.
How many FPS have you play as a chef and spend the first levels killing alien ass monsters that shit at you, armed with a frying pan and eventually throw infinite kitchen knives at red demon dog aliens, while getting health back from the “fresh meat”?
Soon you also get guns and – most importantly – a jetpack, which becomes essential because unlike Duke Nukem 3D, the level design of PO’ED is built around the jetpack, the levels made vast, elaborate and having huge emphasis on verticality, which is frankly impressive for the time and arguably innovative, as most FPS still were built as little more than monster mazes.
The main issue in terms of level design is not the labyrinthine nature of the levels itself, they’re definitely big and have a lot of verticality, hence after the first two-three stages you’re basically given a Jetpack is it’s mandatory, essential for exploring and traversing the levels.
It’s that the level design often tends conflate “big” and “complex” with “good and fun”, resulting in many levels that are too sprawling and overly extensive, where you’re expect to run around in and basically luck out with the exploration, and this is sadly a issue that becomes almost immediatly apparent, even in the first level, as you assume going through the inner parts of the spaceship via corridors you first see is the way…. nope, you gotta take the elevator/lift that goes down.
It’s level design that basically forces you to second guess where your instinct would lead you to go if you have played even few of these 90s FPS, and basically always do the opposite of what your intuition would say, what you would instinctly be lead to do or go.
Another early example is the level Core, has you travel upwards from the base of a core reactor…. but obviously the path that leads to the exit teleporter is NOT at the top, but in a pathway you can see only if you almost go down to the energy core itself and die touching it.
“Helps to have a map”, and you do have one, but it’s a 3D vector based map, it was the 90s and it was cool to see that shit in the old GITS movie or The Matrix, i get it, but it could be better.
So you often will wander and die, reloading and then realizing they snuck the exit almost at the beginning and that some teleporters aren’t so much required to advance but act just as shortcuts, while you’re expected to check the map or otherwise do stuff required for secret areas, like bumping into walls to find the fake one, or notice that the glowing floor or door is fake.
Speaking of moving around, the game is kinda slippery feeling, which is why you can shift from walking and running, useful for some of the trickier platforming, but the jetpack being introduced so early on basically mitigates these issues as you’ll be able to fly about at zippy pace but still control decently, the only drawback to avoid you using the jetpack constantly is that it shares fuel/ammo with the flamethrower, makes sense.
Despite this, exploring isn’t necessarily frustrating, but outside of some secret ammo and health upgrades, unless you wanna kill every enemy (as they’re counted in the level results alongside time), you’re not given too much incentive to explore, yet moving around with the jetpack remains enjoyable and shooting is decent enough, the weapons are actually nothing too weird, aside from the frying pan, throwing knives, or the energy weapon with ricochet bullets called the Meat Seeker (which runs on “meat balls”, obvs), and a very Ratchet & Clank-esque rocket launcher that lets you directly control the rocket in first person view after shooting it.
The arsenal isn’t bad, but some weapons, while decent, lack extra feedback to really make em feel good to use, and there’s no secondary fire for any weapon, for that matter, but i do like little touches like the handwiping of the blood after using the Drill (a chainsaw from Doom Classic, basically).
You can also do a backflip accompained by Ox doing a very cheesy Bruce Lee impressions, which is actually a hold-over feature from its original release, it was a solution to help the player since the 3DO didn’t have analog controls, but in this release serves no purpose outside mild humourous ones.
the enemy variety has plenty of weird shit, aside from the aforementioned alien butts on legs that basically shit at you, the cyborg xenomorphese gun-women thingies, Dalek vacuum sentrys, invisible demon spheres, urchin-esque flying self destructing homing mines, or the slime-booger enemies that keep replicating/splitting.
And lots of annoying flying enemies, that are hard to hit due to their being too fast and having small hitbox, but fear not, it’s not just the bats, ALL flying enemies are pain in the asses but especially so are the indescribed things on jetpack (they never stay still so you never have the chance to look at their sprite) flinging projectiles at you and harassing your exploration in many levels.
On the other hand, there’s more than enough ammo around, and Ox can take a lot of abuse, plus some enemies carcasses can net you some health back, on top of the regular health pickups (and eventual upgrades), so combat isn’t impossible or anything, and even if its still janky and rough in this improved Nightdive remaster, i was having an okay time, for the most part, and i was curious to push on and see what weird bizarre sight the game would have for me next.
Even if a lot of the wall surfaces are still flat colours, and there’s actually very little to say about the audio part, aside from the Bruce Lee impression when doing a backflip and enemy grunts, PO’Ed is a strangely quiet experience, there’s just some brief level specific contextual music, and Ox doesn’t do Duke Nukem/Lo Wang/Caleb style digitized quips, which i feel it was more due to disc memory reasons than a deliberate stylistical choice.
Problem is, eventually the decision to build levels high in verticality and scope kinda bites the game in the ass, as the level design basically fights any exploration instincts you’d have if you played any FPS of the era…. and even now, actually,
Yeah, while the verticality is nice and all, it can lead to huge locales that are nearly unnavigable, like the Canyon level is a confusing mess (with the goal camouflaged by every ridge and sub-area literally looks the same), huge, way too big and samey looking, and insane mazes like these can be followed by big yet better designed levels, or followed by ones that can be super-straighforward.
Things are made worse because, in an attempt to keep things varied, the game becomes accidentally more confusing, as you’re not really quite sure if killing enemies in an area will make the exit portal appear or unlock some other access point, or if you’re supposed to ignore enemies in what looks like an arena but isn’t quite that, and frankly the more the game goes on, the more the level design starts to just annoy and test the player’s patience.
This is kind of confusing shit for which guides were made, because of the game pulling esoteric levels of bullshit that you’re just supposed to know or guess, or stumble upon by accident after running in the level like a headless chicken.
The worst offender might be the level Rapa Nui, where you’d think you missed a switch or something, but no, i didn’t notice one of the pillars in one of the 3 floating temples structures had runes/hierogriphs on one side…. problem is just get a sound warning that will be drowned by other sound unless you kill everyone (ironic given how otherwise this is a fairly quiet auditory experience), and the game is not a full 3D FPS, it just does the classic thing of having 2D sprites facing you all the times (which becomes extra noticeable in flight but that’s not the point), so you’re not really inclined to doublecheck stuff that looks and is purely ornamental.
Especially jarring since the game never does anything like this anywhere else, but also in the same level you’ll have to face temple corridors full of enemies that use ricocheting energy shots, and before the robot boss you’ll be tricked into a fake out puzzle puzzle leading to a trap, which has you just above a spiked ceiling, descending via jetpack, trying to shoot the hierogryphls in some orders… but the puzzle is a fake out, the wall behind you opens for a monster closet, and guess what, if you bump into enemies while using the jetpack they will bounce you back into the spiked ceiling, which you’d assume would be impossible to be damaged by, so obviously signposted it is.
One of the later levels also pulls off multiple fake pavements in a cave like tunnel system, that is also bullshit, as in suddendly having the glowing colored surfaces hurt you, which would make sense but earlier (and later too) you get to see that these are mostly fake walls as well, and hide upper or lower parts of the levels.
And it gets worse because the later levels love to confuse the player, as you’re not even sure if doing a section will activate something, spawn another portal that you have to go through, open a door, there’s no proper rhyme to it besides keep killing the enemies that show up or try explore what you can, as sometimes killing all the mid or heavy ones does trigger something, but not always.
It’s a shame because this de facto inadvertly punishes – while also forcing – exploration, and i wanna stress that it isn’t always like this, that i did have fun with game quirks, combat and exploration in a lot of levels… but i won’t lie, the third chapter/act really made me want to hurry and be done with the game, as the level design kept pulling more and more frustrating bullshit that really should be for secrets, NOT required to simply finish a level, or just being inane round of guessing what the level designer was thinking, and why it seemingly wanted to spite players all of a sudden, to make things so obtuse you’ll have to waste a lot on time or just check a guide.
All to cap the game off with two levels that aren’t actually confusing or infuriating, definitely nowhere as convoluted as the ones preceeding it, making me believe the level being confusing and frustrating was more due to inexperience than deliberate hatred, just the result of an attempt at making a FPS inspired by other popular ones but move away from the tunnel-like style of level design, in order to stand out from the crowd.
The final result isn’t good but isn’t bad either, it’s mostly ok, it can be fun, regardless Nightdive did the expected good job to remaster the game in their KEX engine, adding gyro controls, manual saves and other many options for customization, including the ability to turn off some of the bugfixes if you want, the textures are still flat but they did very good remaster, anything else would go into remake territory, and frankly they did a better job than this game deserves, in a way.
The game has 25 levels plus a couple of secrets, making for a 5 hours campaign (though it took me at least 8/9 hours due to repeating some of the later levels until i gave up and checked a guide)… and that’s it, there’s no multiplayer, there are trophies but there was no expansion to add into this rerelease, it’s not Nightdive fault, and to be honest after beating the game i felt no hurry to go back and get all the ammo and health upgrades, or get perfect kill counts for each level.
Usually a Nightdive remaster-port would include some cut content like levels that were meant to be included in the actual game but weren’t, but (aside from a new level) apparently there wasn’t anything to restore or include here, aside from an unused ET-esque enemy that obviously wasn’t restored, and cheats that apparently you couldn’t actually activate.
That said, even all the improvements and options Nightdive implement for this Definitive Edition rerelease , PO’ED it’ still rough as it was most likely was, a weird niche oddball release from the 3DO library, from a developer, Any Channel, that basically just did this and then peaced out from the gaming landscape, their legacy of shitting butt aliens and frying pan gaming supremacy ensured…. even though the game is still uneven in terms of quality, and ends up being mostly average in the end, as it can be fun but its attempt to make such big and vertical expading levels for a FPS in 1995 was novel, but the level design wasn’t good enough to avoid a lot of levels feeling like byzantine mazes you’d get lost in more by accident more than choice.
For many istances where i had a decent time flying around in a jetpack and blasting a gallery weird ass B-movie alien monsters, there were others i got frustrated to find out the level exit was camouflaged near the beginning, or that i was missing a switch way too well hidden, or that i was supposed to search for fake walls and-or secrets rooms or just in order to progress.
Yet i can’t hate too much a game where you use meat balls to power an alien energy gun, and the ending illustration panning over to show Ox having made weird ass scary meals out of the aliens he fough (down to making a Goosebumps style horror sammich) is sure something you don’t forget.
I can’t quite recommend, especially it if you hate labyrinthine levels in old FPS games, but fans of the genre will find it to be at least a delectable weird curiosity, and its 20 bucks MSRP isn’t bad, since its rarity, obscurity of the game itself and the many improvements expected by modern Nightdiver remasters, personally got it on sale for 12 bucks or something.
And despite my lamentations, i’m glad i’ve played it, i’m really did, it’s definitely “something else”.
Also, now i do kinda wanna review the other 3DO FPS that Nightdive remastered, Killing Time.
