Turbo Overkill by developer Trigger Happy Interactive and publisher Apogee Entertainment—PC (Steam) preview written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Skipping straight to dessert like any good meal should be, here’s the conclusion for Turbo Overkill,
Turbo Overkill is bonkers in the best way possible. With extremely fast and smooth movement blended into a fast paced Retro based First Person Shooter, you’ll be running, gunning, dashing, air-dashing, double jumping, wall running and chainsaw leg sliding your way through an awesome looking cyberpunk world.
Now if you’re still here and haven’t gone out to get your hands on this bonkers retro based adventure, let’s continue!
Turbo Overkill is one the latest retro styled First Person Shooter that is bringing back the magic of the early 90’s but with today’s refinements all the way into ultrawide resolutions. Take that 90’s 13” square monitors! Getting back on topic though, for this cyberpunk based adventure you’ll be putting on the shoes of Johnny Turbo who’s been sent to a city called Paradise in order to take out an AI named Syn who’s been making flesh and machine based abominations that are now running wild.
Set up in a series of stages that have to be run and gunned through, there’s nothing overly complicated with the premise or the goals, just how you’re going to get to these goals. Turbo Overkill takes from a variety of other titles (taken from Steam page):
- Kill a boss, get its augment (special power)
- Play Spider-Man with your grappling hook
- One-up Duke Nukem with your chainsaw kick
- Kills = cash. Use cash to install augments, upgrade your weapons, and add new abilities in your talent tree
- Be a ghost runner while wall running
- Attack from above riding the hood of your flying car like a kung-furious badass
- Mini-rockets built into your robotic arm? ✔
- This. List. Will. Grow. Wishlist the game to see it happen
and throws them all into one big awesome blending pot which just works. The sheer speed in which everything is going on is intense but at the same time allows for you to really get into the action as you start off with quite a few abilities such as double jumping, chainsaw sliding and it doesn’t take long to be able to wall run.
Weapons come in your standard variety of pistols, shotguns, uzis, etc, but each has a secondary mode that can be unlocked which changes up the name of the game. Pistols for example can auto target several enemies and once charged up enough there’s no hiding from their destructive power. Uzis by comparison go from dual wielding to only holding one for more accuracy. Less spray and pray for more accuracy but if the situation calls for it, spray and pray away!
There’s a versatility in the design of the stages and the weapons that allow for a variety of playstyles. For example, I would have been taking it much slower had I not had access to being able to slide around at ridiculous speeds with my chainsaw leg going right through lesser enemies. Why use ammo when you can use a chainsaw that doesn’t need gas? Add in a hill for added speed and you have added damage! This said, you could also slide around and fire away at that giant incoming crowd of lesser enemies as they can kill you just as fast as the tougher ones if they get their… hands? Claws? Blades? Appendages! on you.
While there is listed inspiration from the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem and Quake but in a cyberpunk world, there’s also what I felt like some influence from BioShock and Deus EX in that you can “splice” yourself to add in augments to make yourself even deadlier. Falling more in line with Deus Ex for the augments as you can plug and play with the parts, the BioShock comes in with the enemy design as most of these things are no longer human and I don’t think there’s any way for them to come back as they’ve been spliced too far.
These above-mentioned augments can be found either in vending machines for cash money dollars that you can get by taking out the hordes of rampaging enemies, or they can be found in locked chests once you find the keys. These augments can easily change a situation from being a tough encounter to being nothing more than a light breeze as you modify your chainsaw leg to gain both health and armor on enemy kills. Giant horde of lesser enemies? Between your guns and your legs to either mow through them or just double jump over them, you’ll have options for whatever works best for you.
That’s really it for now. Having just launched into Early Access however, there’s still plenty more to come. If you happened to skip all the way down here though and miss the conclusion above, here it is again and we look forward to seeing more Turbo Overkill!
Turbo Overkill is bonkers in the best way possible. With extremely fast and smooth movement blended into a fast paced Retro based First Person Shooter, you’ll be running, gunning, dashing, air-dashing, double jumping, wall running and chainsaw leg sliding your way through an awesome looking cyberpunk world.
Score: N/A
