At a glance: Power Lords · Odyssey 2 · Magnavox, 1983 · Action shooter · Score: 7.0/10
By 1983 the Odyssey 2 needed headlines, and headlines in 1983 meant toys. Power Lords was Revell’s line of science-fiction action figures, and Magnavox’s adaptation casts the player as Adam Power defending his volcanic fortress against the forces of Arkus — waves of attackers, a serpentine menace, and the kind of multi-screen defence that the system’s late programmers had learned to stage. It was among the final North American releases for the console, and the crash cut its production short, which is why the cartridge is now one of the genuinely scarce US Odyssey 2 games.
How it plays
The game itself earns more than its rarity. The fortress defence structure — protect the volcano base against escalating assaults, manage your position across the playfield, and survive waves that combine threats — gives it a busier, more modern shape than the early library. Adam Power’s sprite is one of the larger, more detailed hero figures on the system, and the volcanic setting lets the palette do something moodier than the usual primary-colour space. It feels like a 1983 game, which on this system is a compliment about ambition.
The licence cuts both ways. Players who had the toys got the fantasy wholesale; players who did not are handed a mythology at full volume with little explanation, and the difficulty — tuned arcade-hard in the late manner — does not stop to teach. Sessions can be short and bruising until the wave patterns are learned. That toughness, plus the low production run, shaped its reputation: a game more collected than played for many years.
A toy line, a volcano and the end of a console’s life — Power Lords is the Odyssey 2’s rarest American cartridge and a tougher, richer action game than its scarcity suggests.
The details that decide it
Revisited now, it plays better than that reputation. The defence loop is legible, the escalating waves are fairly signalled, and there is a satisfaction in holding the fortress that simpler Odyssey 2 shooters do not attempt. It is also a piece of industry history in a cartridge: the toy-first licensing strategy that would dominate the decade, arriving on the system just as the market fell away beneath it.
The longer game
Playing it now, with the crash context stripped away, the fortress defence holds up as the core of a respectable late-period action game. The waves compose their threats thoughtfully — the serpent, the airborne attackers and the ground assault each demand a different answer from the same controls — and Adam Power’s comparatively large, characterful sprite gives the defence a protagonist where most Odyssey 2 shooters offer a shape. The volcano setting is more than palette: the fortress is a position to hold, and the game’s drama is positional, a small siege renewed every wave. It is the system’s most 1983 design in the best sense — busier, more layered, more willing to be difficult.
The toy licence, so often a warning sign, is here mostly framing. Players who never owned a Power Lords figure lose the mythology but keep the game, because the game explains itself in play: defend, endure, escalate. What the licence really bought Magnavox was shelf presence in the system’s final Christmas push — presence the crash then squandered, leaving the cartridge’s production run short and its modern price long.
Playing it today
Difficulty, again, but from the player’s side: the game is hard in the patterned way, not the arbitrary way, and that distinction decides whether a tough cartridge ages into respect or resentment. Power Lords’ waves announce themselves, its threats behave consistently, and its deaths instruct — the fortress falls at the point the player now understands. Sessions lengthen predictably as the patterns are learned, which is the arcade contract honoured on a home system in its final season. Players who bounce off it in ten minutes are having the intended first experience; the game is asking for the second hour, and repays it.
The production context adds a melancholy footnote collectors feel in the price: Power Lords was a 1983 release for a console discontinued in March 1984, sold into a collapsing market beside a toy line fighting its own battles. Its scarcity is an accident of timing, not a marketing strategy, and its survival in playable numbers at all is a small credit to the households that bought it new. Every loose copy in circulation is a crash survivor.
So the recommendation splits honestly. Players: it is worth its premium over the commons, a genuinely strong late action game. Completists: it is the keystone of the American set, and the copy you verify carefully is the copy you keep. Either way, Adam Power’s volcano is still standing — besieged since 1983, and still, on a good run, holding.
Verdict
Rarity has priced complete copies firmly, and loose cartridges command real money by Odyssey 2 standards. For once, the collectible premium sits on a game worth the playing time as well as the shelf space.
That price demands the usual discipline: verify the label (this title attracts optimistic listings), buy the cartridge for play rather than the story for speculation, and know that the Brazilian Serpente do Poder release exists as the same game’s exotic sibling. Scarce, tough and genuinely good — the rarest combination on the system, in every sense.
Seven out of ten as a game, and a separate, sterner number as a purchase: know what it costs before you fall for it, because Power Lords is where the Odyssey 2’s famously gentle prices end. The game underneath the premium is real — a layered, patterned, genuinely tough fortress defence with the system’s most ambitious late presentation — and the premium itself is history’s, a short production run ended by an industry crash rather than by any failure of the cartridge. That combination makes it the one Odyssey 2 title where the collector and player markets fully agree, and agreed prices in this hobby only move one way. The advice is therefore simple and slightly urgent: decide which of the two buyers you are, verify the cartridge carefully — label, provenance, price against current sold listings — and if the game is what you want, the Brazilian and loose American routes both lead to the same volcano. Adam Power has held it since 1983 against worse odds than a high asking price. He can hold it a little longer, until the right copy reaches the right shelf.
In this series: Power Lords is one of eighteen Odyssey 2 cartridges reviewed in this build-up of the system’s shelf, alongside features on The Voice, the Master Strategy Series, the keyboard and the Videopac years, a hidden gems list and a full buying guide. Read it with the flagship history, Odyssey 2 Forever, for the whole story of the keyboard console — and if you are choosing a first cartridge from the set, the scores in this series are the shortlist, with the buying guide’s hedged price ranges as the shopping list.
It was never released on Videopac in Europe — one of only three US Odyssey 2 games Europe never got — though a Brazilian release appeared as Serpente do Poder. Our verdict: The licensed finale: ambitious, difficult and genuinely scarce. Worth hunting for players, not just completists.