Turbo Overkill

I tend to gravitate toward quiet, handcrafted games that know their own scale. Turbo Overkill is none of those things, and somewhere around the hovercar highway sequence in Act One - leaping hood to hood over neon-drenched traffic while rival bounty hunters peppered me from all sides - I completely stopped resisting it. This is a boomer shooter built by a two-person team at Trigger Happy Interactive, and the ambition-to-headcount ratio is genuinely staggering. You play as Johnny Turbo, a half-mechanical bounty hunter dropped into Paradise, a cyberpunk city where the rogue AI Syn has infected the population and turned it into an augmented army. The story is thin but punchy, delivered through sharp voice work and hidden audio logs that reward exploration without ever making you stop moving. The whole thing spans three acts and around two dozen stages, each one layered with secrets, bonus arena encounters, and collectible modifiers that can flip the difficulty into genuinely punishing territory. Pacing is relentless. There is no slow opening here to defend. The movement system is where the craft really shows. Slides, wall-runs, double-jumps, air-dashes, a grappling hook, and the now-legendary chainsaw leg - the "cheg" - combine into a toolkit that rewards players who treat the arenas as skate parks rather than corridors. One reviewer compared it to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater crossed with Quake, and that is not far off. The arenas are open and organic, built without a single correct path through them, and finding your own perfect line through a swarm of enemies never loses its appeal. There is a late-stage low-gravity battle that reshuffles all your movement intuitions with a satisfying lurch, and that hovercar highway section remains one of the finest FPS set pieces in recent memory. The arsenal backs all of this up: Twin Magnums with lock-on, the Boomer Shotgun with its attached grenade launcher, a Telefragger sniper rifle that teleports Johnny inside an enemy before they detonate from within, an orbital laser cannon, arm-mounted micro-missiles. Kills drop Zhen currency for weapon upgrades and gene augments, and a well-timed late-game augment that boosts damage on weapon swap turns the whole combat system into a deeply satisfying juggling act. The honest criticisms are real, though. Enemy AI is simple to the point of being exploitable, and the combat philosophy is closer to Serious Sam than Doom Eternal - if it moves, shoot it, worry about priority later. Some of the best augments are locked to the back half of the game, so the early hours feel slightly less expressive than the late ones. A handful of weapons have oddly weak sound design that clashes with the otherwise excellent audio work, and the controls are not remappable in all areas, which stings during the more demanding platforming stretches. On controller specifically, the wall-jump responsiveness has frustrated some players. Mouse and keyboard is the better choice here. The soundtrack, for the record, earns its keep: hard-driving synth for traversal, heavy metal that crashes in during boss fights like a second ambush. Trigger Happy built something that refuses to be modest, and on the whole the confidence is justified. At 86 on Metacritic and sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam with a 95% approval rate, the reception reflects a game that largely delivers on its wild promise. It occasionally loses itself in its own escalation, heaping systems on you simply because it thinks they are cool rather than because the design demands it. Mostly, that is fine. Turbo Overkill is in a competition only with itself, and watching it win that competition across 10 to 12 hours is a particular kind of loud, pyrotechnic joy.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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