When you can start a review by saying the game made you feel like the phrase “[expletive] you, the horse you rode in on, and all that came with you!” I think it might be giving the carrot before the stick. I struggle with the term “Boomer shooter” that we’ve got going on right now to talk about this revival of Doom clones. The FPS’ of pixel origin before polygons were normal, like Doom, Duke, and Serious Sam are the bedrock of my love of shooters. Trigger Happy Interactive and Apogee Entertainment’s Turbo Overkill drenches the off-center gunplay and high-paced action in gory Cyberpunk aesthetics.

Released into Early Access last April, the colorful and slightly pixelated shooter finished up its Early Access development recently, with the final chapter to the story of Johnny Turbo coming to an end. On a mission to rid the neon-drenched Paradise of the Syn virus, Turbo becomes an office cleaner’s nightmare as he skates about with the speed of Fernando Alonso going through 130R.

Art surrounding Turbo Overkill showed Johnny looking like a T600 with a melted face. Additionally, one of the first things you are taught is that sliding along the floor like it is marble activates the chainsaw in your knee. I was immediately sold!

1993’s Doom if it were on some Columbian marching powder, Turbo Overkill places you into a room and sends you on your merry way to explore what are admittedly small levels to begin with, especially at the speed you skate around at. You explore in the most literal sense, as you are given little direction other than the level design and the obvious point that what you’ll want to pick up is floating coated in bright colors. With as many collectibles as the typical Ubisoft title, you’ll speed around the maps and catch glances at all collectibles that you’ll probably B-line straight to.

That’s where I think I need to step in and say I might have a small issue with Turbo Overkill. The speed and action go hand-in-hand, there is no denying that. However, said speed matched with platforming creates a sad/annoyed terminator. Stepping back to the collectibles for a moment, you’ll pick up upgrades, tech-chips, and tapes. Of course, the upgrades are for Turbo himself but tech-chips are akin to cheats for fun stuff and the tapes seem to be for secret levels. Some are more obvious and easy to find than others, but a select few are on thin platforms or across complicated jumps.

Complicated jumps I don’t mind, but thin platforms, when only a stab at W, A, S, or D launches you a good few feet, can slow the high-octane pace to a crawl. Bouncing between points in levels to complete objectives, you’ll possibly catch better ways to platform to certain areas. Sadly, it can be difficult to do so when you only have a fraction of a picosecond to glance at anything. Of course, I should point out that there is a walk toggle because by default we run like Usain Bolt on meth in these games. Chances are you’ll hit U by mistake and only find out what it does when you attempt to go back to running.

Gunplay is of course the focus as that is the majority of the gameplay, though it does feel impactful. More often than not, I’ve found myself sliding along the ground meaning that Mrs Turbo might be shouting at Johnny about the holes in his jeans. Designed to make you feel like the coolest mass murderer, you’ll be sliding along the ground and shotgunning some of the game’s malformed monsters. You’ll face quadrupedal T-rex-like things, skinny methheads with TVs for brains, Optimus Composite, and everything else under the sun.

As can be expected, throughout the episodes and levels, you’ll pick up new weapons. This isn’t the only way you’ll progress either. Each body part has augments as well as alt-fires for each weapon, both of which are bought in stores. The stores themselves are hilarious, as the gun store sounds like an American from the deep South, the augment machine uses peer pressure to get you to change things up, and the normal store itself doesn’t actually do much. The augments are why I use the chainsaw a little bit too much though. Early augments gave me 6 armor and health on kills, making death highly unlikely.

That is not to say there isn’t an attempt to kill you repeatedly. Every enemy you cross is bigger, badder, and uglier than the thing before. Early shotgun-based enemies get shields, so you can’t just chainsaw through them. You’ll also find The Binding of Isaac’s Conjoined Fatty merged with Colin Furze’s blade belt, I think. By the time you get to the later levels in episode 3, you’ve got arena sections that can take as long as the early levels themselves. You’re constantly on the move, sometimes double, triple, and quadruple jumping off of walls, shotgunning monsters into liquid viscera, and hook-shotting your way over the top. The only time you touch the ground is to pick up health and ammo.

If that doesn’t sound 90s enough with its Quake/Doom-like madness, the tech-chips that offer the “fun cheat-like stuff” are literally big head modes, low gravity, chainsaw-only runs, enemy randomizers, and so on. The tapes that offer secret levels aren’t story-focused, at least to my understanding. They are more akin to another mode that’s available through the main menu, an endless mode. Secret levels are a lot more focused on progressing to obtain more and more weapons after every kill and wave. Endless mode is something you can tailor a bit more to your style by selecting loadouts and deciding how frequently the timeouts come.

That’s all well and good, but how modern is Turbo Overkill? The accessibility options are reasonable, though I want to point out that the stylized font can be a little difficult for someone with dyslexia. You can adjust the rate of screen flashes, camera shakes, toggles, changes in perspective, and of course, a FOV that goes beyond 100, including a weapon FOV if you feel so inclined. There are a number of options available graphically and overall, but even on the highest of settings, the recommended system requirements or greater should hit 60fps with ease.

I don’t know if it was a bug with the press build I’ve been playing over the last couple of days, but with Vsync disabled and frame limiters off, Turbo Overkill didn’t want to go above 60. Turn Vsync on and the frame rate comes out to play, sitting around 190-210 for me, which should be standard for anyone with an RTX 30 series. As I said before, performance isn’t something to worry about. The only times I’ve seen any hint of a drip below 60 has been loading the cinematics, which a majority of the levels have, but in gameplay it runs as smooth as butter.

“What about the story?” Well, I’ve sort of ignored that until now because being a “Doom clone” you know what the story is. An angry man has something very evil to fight against, now go out and murder indiscriminately. Focused around the Syn virus, you’ll spend the first episode trying to rid Paradise of this megalomaniac program seeking to create a better world, just without you or anything organic in it. At least you would be trying to kill Syn if it wasn’t for the fact you are the one caught in the middle of Syn and MAW trying to battle out for power. It’s like a techno battle between Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The final chapters start you off joining forces with the thing that you were trying to rid this hellhole of in the first place, only it has been a couple of years since your crusade began. As a story, it might be trying to do too much for what the gameplay is, and that isn’t meant to downplay either part. Though it has to be said that the fact you are standing around for a couple of minutes listening to Syn as they explain why you should fight with them against MAW once again slows the pace down to a crawl.

At times I’ve sat saying to myself, “I want to keep playing!” and at other times, one level on its own is enough for me to say “when” after being asked if I want to continue or stop. I keep coming back because the gameplay is fun, energetic, and neverendingly gory. Sadly, once the short levels are dispensed with, the 30 minutes of running back and forth across the maze looking for keys, completing objectives, and growing maps with more intricate platforming sections gets tiring. “Ascension” in the first episode is the first notable example of the latter.

Not that the blades or otherwise kill you and end the level there and then. Only enemies can do that, which makes it worthwhile playing on higher difficulties once you’ve gotten comfortable with the early tools. Still, the frustration is there for a few seconds before you are thrown back to a checkpoint, which you might be visiting for more than launching yourself into whirring blades of death. I have found myself sliding around the place on a chainsawed knee, getting stuck under odd bits of geometry.

Jumping, dashing, and sliding behind boxes or under ramps and staircases can put you into a looped animation before juttering free. Nonetheless, there may be an occasion of getting stuck completely if you are extra skilled at becoming a programmer’s nightmare. You might not be able to get everywhere under the sun, which is probably blocked out by the Ana De Armas-like ads in the skyline, but you are given the world to explore.

Ultimately, Turbo Overkill is a fun, colorful, and very 90s action shooter with the right blend of early Doom and modern sensibilities to make it fun for as many people as possible. The platforming and some story might get on some people’s nerves with how pushy each wants to be. There might be either a little too much story being forced upon you or too much platforming on thin railings over neverending voids, shock pits, and blades of death. There is nothing quite like jumping over multi-story monsters, hook-shotting back and forth over top, all while firing rockets into its eye that’s about to break off to become its second stage.

A PC review copy of Turbo Overkill was provided by Apogee Entertainment for this review.

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Turbo Overkill

$19.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Doom on caffeine.
• Well-lit pixel geometry will always look decent.
• Who do I contact about getting a chainsaw in my knee?

Cons

• Some high-paced precise platforming.
• The story might feel like it gets in the way sometimes.