The Mog Blog

First before we begin, I just wall say Happy New Year to everyone. Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday and maybe a few games were thrown in.

So this is the first review of a PS Mini we’ve got a chance to do on the The Mog Blog, unfortunately I am a bit disappointed that this is it. Not saying that P.O.W. is a bad game but I have to be blunt with you, it suffers from what I call “Mini’s Syndrome.” To understand what “Mini’s Syndrome” is, you have to first understand what a mini is. PS Minis was a thing that originally started for the PSP that saw quite a few mobile ports to the platform. Unfortunately, it came with a few drawbacks. Not only did the minis turn out to be single player only unless designed to use one device for multiplayer, without any connectivity by ad-hoc or wireless it gave you little incentive to grab them over actual PSP games when those were getting hit with major price drops over the year. Eventually the minis were moved to play on PS3 (also comfirmed to work with PSVita) as well as keeping the same drawbacks. This is exactly what cripples this game. The only upside to it is that minis range in price from $1-$7.

When in doubt, grab an enemy machine gun.

P.O.W. is a classic arcade beat-em-up in which you must escape from a P.O.W. camp (I know, original isn’t it?). It actually reminds me of games I used to play back on the Game Boy but alas, those were times best left forgotten… except for LoZ:Links Awakening. Don’t expect anything new since this is a port of the Arcade title from 1988. You have your basic punch, kick, and jump though SNK/Playmore has been doing a REALLY good job of releasing quality ports of their arcade games. Unfortunately a quality port doesn’t necessarily mean a quality game. Again, its not bad but “mini syndrome” strikes. This is the type of game that would have benefited from multiplayer. If this was a NeoGeo Station game, maybe I would have thought differently.

Final Verdict: I’m not much of a fan of beat-em-ups and I admit that my opinion of this may seem unfair but I have come to play more games like this over time. One major thing I personally need is the ability to play with a buddy. Besides that, its an all right game and my only complaint is the lack of multiplayer. Besides that, for $3 its a fair price to pass the time.