POed: Definitive Edition Thoughts

I initally tried the game out for about an hour and it felt awful, level design is bad, some parts of it can be red herrings like how there is a platforming section in level 2 but you can skip entirely by sprint jumping from the left adjcent to the platforming section to reach the level exit, enemies can fire projectiles far away from you even though you are far from their line of sight, you can get hit the moment you load into a level, you can get randomly attacked from all sides, and the guns are just maybe "okay" at best. This clearly does feel like an FPS post Doom and Dark Forces and pre Quake and Duke Nukem 3D.

It even has the jetpack before Duke 3D but it just feels clunky and awkward to use since I don't even recall there being a dedicated descend button and I just kept on unequiping it to descend faster.

Another example of how bad the level design is in level 3 in how you need to go past a wall to progress through a level but the wall texture looks the same as all the other walls textures in the level.

The game might as well be: terrible level design, the game.

To prove my point, you can esstentially speedrun through the levels without even being an expert speedrunner by taking advantages of exploits, glitches, level skips or taking advantage of spawn points or event triggers since in POed, and I'm not even kidding here, the entire act of killing enemies, activating switches and exploration is filler 95% of of the time. Sure some levels require you to kill enemies but other levels just require you to reach the exit and that's it. The hard part is knowing where level exit actually is, you don't need to hunt keys, do objectives or even kill every enemy in the level to get to the end, all you need to do is just run past enemies and touch the exit and you complete the level.

The hard part is to know *where* to go since the levels are overly large, bloated and generally has a samey looking feel to them but get this, once you know exactly where to go, these levels can beaten in less than 5 if not 3 minutes.

Everything about POed feels like the devs didn't even know how to make an FPS game or how to make an FPS game engaging or fun. They didn't even know how to design levels and it's a speedrun game where the challenge comes from navigating the same looking areas and figuring out where in the overly large levels you need to go next. Some of the levels end so abruptly once you figure out where to go that my jaw was on the floor in how laughably short and not very challenging it is, parts of me where like, "is that seriously it?"

What even is the motif of this game? Every 90s FPS game had a distinct motif about them Doom was sci fi supernatural involving hell, Quake is about medieval horror, Duke 3D was an action movie parody, Blood was a horror genre parody and so on, POed's themes and motif is basically seems like the devs just doing throwing everything at the wall and hoping to see something stick, it certainly feels like they were taking the piss.

Overall, playing POed Definitive Edition feels awful in every sense of the word, it's not even so bad it's funny like say Rogue Warrior is, the game is just plain bad, how Nightdive chose to remaster this game instead of Disruptor or any game with a geniune cult following is truly beyond me, if this was supposed to be a long lasting April Fool's joke, then it worked because I got POed while playing this.