I didn’t originally plan to write a review on this game so I’ll keep it short. I bought this game a while back and had only gotten around to playing it a couple days ago, and when I did, I discovered something truly magnificent. Masters of the Universe: The Power of He-Man™ is one of those games that you remembered existing but remembered nothing about otherwise, but today I found something worth remembering it for, which you shall see in a little while.

First impressions are great; there is a proper title screen, which is more than I can say for many Intellivision games, usually it’s just the green background and stock text. When you start the game you see a tiny blocky He-Man run to a tiny blocky Windraider and take off, the background is very nice. When the game begins in earnest you are faced with two different enemy types, fireballs and Skeletor himself; the Skeletor sprite looks excellent, while the fireballs are just the same sprite only spinning around, depending on the difficulty the fireballs are different colors. The background scrolls very quickly, almost like the console has Blast Processing or something. There is a second part to this game, where you, as a blocky He-Man, approach Skeletor whilst avoiding many objects, it looks fine, and considering how much is going on, very flicker free.

This game has what I believe to be the best sound ever produced on the Intellivision, and perhaps even in all of retro gaming. The sound of the bomb dropping is bass filled ear bliss, I like EDM music, I love the sound of a good phat bass, and He-Man delivers, it was so good I decided to tweet about it, (https://twitter.com/TheDoctorSpuds/status/1034107411240505346). Otherwise the He-Man theme song that plays during the title screen is an excellent rendition, and the rest of the sounds are very good as well. I’ll admit to simply turning on the game and flying left while constantly dropping bombs because the sound is SO GOOD!

When compared to the 2600 game of the same name the Intellivision version is infinitely more playable, even with that awful controller. All you really do is fly 30 miles to the right, whilst shooting fireballs and dropping bombs on Skeletor, and then swordfight with Skeletor by running through a gauntlet of fireballs and magic missiles. Due to the fact it’s a point based game, I feel it can get away with being rather simple and perhaps shallow at times, but with four different difficulty levels the game hardly gets boring.

Needless to say I think every Intellivision owner should own this game, due to it being a licensed game it’s a bit expensive, 15-20$ for a loose cartridge and don’t even try to get this game in the box, but I think it’s worth it. I know this was a bit of a shorter review, I’ve noticed that my reviews are getting, perhaps, too long, and have decided to shorten things a bit. If you like the shorter reviews let me know in the comments, and if you want longer reviews please do the same.