SCORE: ★★★★
THE BREAKDOWN
+Gorgeous, high-effort retro graphics that still boast high detail and ooze style
+A wide range of cybernetic implants that allow the player to make ridiculous builds
+Stellar level design
+Chainsaw leg baseball slide!!
-A few gimmicks outstay their welcome
-The last act's levels can drag a bit
Leaping between flying vehicles zipping through a tunnel at hundreds of miles per hour, I empty dual uzis into a minigun-wielding cyborg. I leap off a shuddering, flaming wreck just before it explodes and thrust both legs out to land on the next enemy a few cars over. He might be expecting a kick - instead, he gets a chainsaw to the head, buzzing him in half as I'm already sliding at an absurd speed to close the gap between my current platform and an enormous train packed with rocket launcher-wielding foes. The saw comes out again; this time, it mulches at least a dozen screaming psychos before they can take a swing with their improvised weapons. Soon, I'm circle-strafing what looks like Yes Man from Fallout: New Vegas on steroids, emptying clips into his television screen face while a floating obelisk that's made almost entirely of eyeballs as wide as I am tall tries to pick me off with plasma beams.
This is all just one level of Turbo Overkill, a slice of boomer shooter heaven that pushes the genre forward even as it fondly pays tribute to the past.
Johnny Turbo - what a name - is a 'street cleaner', a corporate mercenary sent to the planet of Paradise to investigate the unusual behavior of one of the company's most powerful assets: an advanced AI named Syn that's the secret to their success. Finding upon arrival that much of the cyberpunk-like supercity is aflame, he's tasked with tracking the rogue intelligence down while fighting through the hordes of the local gangsters and civilians who have been turned into its drones. While story is by no means the focus of Turbo Overkill, I actually had a lot of fun with the game's narrative; it's lightweight and unintrusive, but features some compellingly slimy characters who are fun to watch. Its infrequent cutscenes are useful breathers from the action, and are mostly just enjoyable excuses to watch Johnny do something sick or make a villain all the more delightfully hateable so that it's more fun to kill them later. It reminds me a lot of how fun Doom 2016's cutscenes were, before the franchise started to get bogged down in its own lore and self-seriousness come Eternal.
Unsurprisingly, the real focus is on the gameplay. A boomer shooter at heart, Turbo Overkill is about mowing down enormous numbers of enemies, navigating levels at a sprint that could violate local speed limits, and ferreting out the occasional bonuses and secrets. At these core conceits, the game does a fantastic job; moving and shooting feel great, and well-designed levels are both visually exciting and fun to navigate, with the retro-inspired graphics used as a basis to give a Blade Runner-style feel to things, but employing modern technology for draw distance and scale that makes it a treat for a player to look around and judge their next move. Enemies are well-designed, too; there's a nice mix of fodder and challenging foes in most encounters, and new foes are regularly introduced that add another dimension to fights.
What really makes the game stand out, however, is what it does to build on this rock solid foundation. In the last decade, we've seen a resurgence of boomer shooters, with some relying on their fundamentals and tone (like DUSK) and others leaning hard into something specific to make them stand out (like Ultrakill and its insane parkour and weapons). Turbo Overkill makes a stellar effort at doing both, supplementing its fundamentals with an elaborate cybernetic system that gives the player a lot more say in Johnny's playstyle than they'd get in many shooters. By purchasing parts and implanting them into the available slots, the player can focus more on movement and parkour, offensive firepower, or even specific gimmicks. I, for example, bought the game in the first place due to the trailers showing Johnny baseball-sliding hundreds of feet at a time, his leg transforming into a chainsaw to obliterate everything in its path. With the game's upgrade system, I was not only able to make the chainsaw hit harder and leech more life from foes, but I was even able to implant a second chainsaw into my OTHER leg, doubling every benefit and turning the move from a way to suck a little health from fodder enemies into a vicious dropkick that could even deal significant damage to bosses.
This freedom of gameplay style is reflected in the level design, which veers more open-ended than many boomer shooters. I rarely felt hobbled by the lack of investment I made into the advanced parkour, but I saw plenty of opportunities where those who had could have taken routes or approached fights in ways that I couldn't. With how much there is to juggle, it's incredibly impressive that Turbo Overkill manages to be as persistently challenging as it is, even if I do recommend raising the difficulty one above normal if you want to struggle early on outside of the well-designed boss fights.
This isn't to say that I didn't have any complaints. A few levels built around gimmicks like driving Johnny's flying car outstayed their welcome and had me eager to get back to the shooting and platforming that the game does best. On the other end of the spectrum, while I mostly found the game well-paced, the third act has a lot of levels with back-to-back slugfests with enormous numbers of tough enemies; while I wouldn't necessarily cut any levels out given the choice, it would have been nice if the climax was more focused on the fantastic bespoke moments that it's already peppered with.
But these are minor nitpicks when weighed against everything that makes Turbo Overkill shine. Visceral and satisfying, gloriously violent and pointedly irreverent, it does what few retro-inspired shooters manage to do: pump new life into a well-trod genre and prove there's still room for innovation while not losing sight of the simple, satisfying thrills that made it evergreen in the first place. For that reason alone, I can't recommend it enough.
