The headline is this: Turbo Overkill is SO FRICKIN FUN. This is an indie (I think) take on a Doom 2016/Eternal -- old school shootin' with HD graphics, big guns and platforming -- but the twist is you have a chainsaw leg that absolutely RIPS through enemies.

Because this is an episodic game with three distinct campaigns taking about 15 hours total to run through, the pacing almost feels like you're playing a trilogy of small games rather than one large one. You can tell the developers learned where they wanted to take their vision for Turbo Overkill as they developed it through the early access process, and in many ways you see improvements in episodes 2/3 over the first.

It packs so much in here. Bosses, platforming segments, vehicular sections, labyrinthian levels with keys, arena style encounters, wave-based encounters, and an enormous breadth of environmental/art design that betrays the cookie cutter cyberpunk story you begin the game with.

While this is impressive, this massive scope is also what holds Turbo Overkill back from being one of the greatest shooters of all time. There's too much of it! Most levels are 30 minutes long and feel like they should be 15-20, and nearly all of the gimmicky sections like boss fights and vehicle sections get overindulgent. At a certain point it just keeps throwing waves of the same enemy types, and while the gunplay feels great, it can get exhausting.

But if you like nu-Doom and want a boomer shooter that feels more like that game than a shooter from 1999, I can't recommend TO enough. The weapons feel great, the alt-fires rock, and ripping through enemies sliding around on a chainsaw leg like a fricked up Tony Hawk feels ethereal. And the story, for as clunky as it can get at times, is a pretty funny take on a grim sci-fi narrative.

So while you have to put up with a bit, I ultimately think doing so is worth it because on the other side of that friction is some of the most fun first person shooting I've probably ever played.

P.S. It works great on Steam Deck now! Set it to 40 fps in your device-level settings and go nuts! But turn off auto-aim. You probably don't need it and I think it's way too aggressive.

努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
ランドリー今日はガラ空きでラッキーデイ
かったりい油汚れもこれでバイバイ
誰だ誰だ頭の中 呼びかける声は
あれが欲しいこれが欲しいと歌っている
幸せになりたい 楽して生きていたい
この手に掴みたい あなたのその胸の中
ハッピーで埋め尽くして レストインピースまで行こうぜ
いつかみた地獄もいいところ 愛をばら撒いて
アイラブユー貶してくれ 全部奪って笑ってくれマイハニー
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
なんか忘れちゃってんだ
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
4443で外れる炭酸水
ハングリー拗らせて吐きそうな人生
「止まない雨はない」より先に その傘をくれよ
あれが欲しい これが欲しい 全て欲しい ただ虚しい
幸せになりたい 楽して生きていたい
全部滅茶苦茶にしたい 何もかも消し去りたい
あなたのその胸の中
ラッキーで埋め尽くして レストインピースまで行こうぜ
良い子だけ迎える天国じゃ どうも生きらんない
アイラブユー貶して奪って笑ってくれマイハニー
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
なんか忘れちゃってんだ
ハッピー ラッキー こんにちはベイビー
良い子でいたい そりゃつまらない
ハッピーラッキー こんにちはベイビーソースイート
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
なんかすごい良い感じ
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star
努力 未来 a beautiful star

almost as authentic and retrõ and FunnY as Kung Fury, definitely captures the super turbo brutal megakill buttmetal ironic&insincere "aesthetic" that Doom and its descendants have been denigrated into within the public hivemind during the past decade+. prepare2frag like no tomorrow in this aimtrainer almost as good as Titanfall 2 (but not quite....) that's so freakin insane&intense that you and your fellow kids might even be up to the task of beating the first half of Quake 3's bot match campaign on nightmare afterwards (dont be afraid to ask for help from daddy tho!...). your guns in this are literal pewpew blasters that are about as limp as the "absolute banger metal that simply slaps" OST and the dicks of the geriatrics in charge of Apogee these days, nuff said.

Its fun, and I'm giving it basically a sort of 7.5/10 because i can respect a game that's very obviously just "Rule of Cool" but i think it still suffers a bit. Voice acting is pretty good for MAW and SAMM(though i'd much rather the protag just...talk, since that's what SAMM pretty much does by the time we're in Ep3 is be our voice), Gianni is always great, and the other voice acting sort of ranges from fine to ehhhh.

Combat is great but a little repetitive, and the bosses are pretty much just "Shoot at this until it goes away" which is very...meh. Games cool though, and I can look past some of this to enjoy it. Music bangs and I like the combat, so I'd say it's prob worth a buy.

Turbo Overkill: Really committing to its title and letting you put the pedal to the metal as Johnny Turbo is quite the speedy killing machine. “Johnny will return...”, but should he? I've seen worse and I've seen better, so I'd say "No" if it's just more of the same.
I've more cons than pros with Turbo Overkill, and while the pros are pretty strong, I just don't think they're quite enough.

This game doesn't run very well which I don't understand. As I type this, it's stuck loading the main menu from the credits since I've just beaten it. I had long loading screens on an SSD (why is dying four times faster than reloading a checkpoint?), bullets freezing in midair, enemies dying but their bodies remain upright and running, FPS drops with seemingly no source, some cutscenes seem to be missing audio cues (which is either a glitch or bad design), terrible checkpoints, and I'd frequently slide into corners/under objects where I'd get stuck. Doesn't feel very “turbo” to get wedged under a rock. I just Alt-F4'd the game to get out of that aforementioned freeze.
The visuals kinda gave me a headache given time. I was reminded of the System Shock remake, only I think I grew accustomed to the blaring lights there and just never quite did here. Maybe this is boomer-brain creeping in as I age, but it was a bit much. When you pick up the DOOM-like upgrades of power fists and what-have-you, it puts a color filter on the screen that made it even harder to see and stand.
Environmental dangers insta-kill you at times which obviously grinds the pacing to a halt for those rooms. Again, not very turbo.
The entire thing is reminiscent of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon but lacks its charm. I don't mind aping off of something else as long as you separate yourself somehow or at least do a damn good job. I don't think they did either of those, here. I don't think it was ever “cringy” but even calling it “serviceable” may be a stretch.
I found myself almost dying instantly, losing all armor and nearly all health, from mid-to-low tier enemies when they used certain attacks like explosives or fire. This was wildly frustrating and didn't make sense to me. I found some of the earlier enemies harder than later ones because of this potential. I played on Street Cleaner (Hard) and there are two difficulties above that, I cannot even imagine how annoying those are.

But the pros I mentioned: Gotta go fast. Johnny Turbo and his chainsaw leg (called a “chegg”, what a gross word) go fast. Some upgrades are just a waste of time and some are obvious necessities, like the one that turns all enemies into health packs if you cut right through the crowds with your chegg. With the right upgrades and the grapple hook, you can basically fly, which felt great.
The weapon upgrades are all pretty good and turn previously useless weapons into powerhouses, like the pistol getting an upgrade to do tons of damage as long as you build up a streak and don't miss. Everything was already pretty tense, but now you feel like every shot needs to count, which can be thrilling.
Some levels have very good arenas and accompanying soundtracks, such as “The Wastes”. I made note of that level because it really nailed both of those, though it did have a lotta green going on and again, potential headaches. Not every level will hit the highs of this one, either, some just suck.
The vehicle segments are all pretty good. Fortunately there are only a few, but I think they were handled well.
You can “cancel” animations and reloads by switching weapons, which Dusk didn't have and drove me insane. Here, it keeps things fluid and fast with the player having the option to do more and get more out of it.

I think Turbo Overkill has shown me that these games need to be short and sweet. Both this and Dusk were too long.

Despite liking some things here, I think I don't really recommend Turbo Overkill. I got it on sale but this was one I could have just missed, easily. It was fun becoming a living chainsaw with guns, but I had to put up with a lot of problems to get there. If you love boomer shooters, you'll enjoy this, but for me? The price of admission felt too high.

This was just an blast to play. At start I was little apprehensive about the movement as it's really fast and kinda slippery but the more I played the more it just clicked, this fast and manic playing style of sliding everywhere a shooting pretty much anything that moves.

Special mention for the level design and the soundtrack, they really nailed these aspects. This is one of the rare ones where the levels never felt confusing even though they can be vast horizontally and vertically. Also the music is great! There are so many different vibes in different levels. I especially enjoyed the Sunset Synthetica one with its spy movie and rock blend.

Only real gripe I have with the game is that the sliding might be little too overpowered and the guns feel secondary to these chainsaw legs of yours. Also some of the guns are not balanced that well. Especially the upgraded ones as I kinda stuck with my favorites in the latter half of the game instead of using the whole arsenal.

Turbo Overkill is one of the best boomer shooters on the market I cannot emphasize how fun the gunplay feels and how much fun it is to be moving at mach-10 and using all your movement abilities correctly to slaughter thousands of enemies. Some annoying parts like the doom eternal-esque rooms of fighting countless waves of enemies to unlock the path and proceed ahead and the final boss was a bit rough but that doesnt stop it from being of my favorite boomer shooters ive played. Best way to describe it is doom eternal but faster and with more movement abilities and the ability to slow time that alone makes it top tier in its own right.

In order to talk about Turbo Overkill, or really any indie developed first person shooter released in recent years, we need to address the Boomer Shooter elephant in the room. These types of games are practically ubiquitous now, certainly past a saturation point, ironically akin to the “Doom Clone” moniker pinned on those prehistoric FPS games released under that shadow and crawling out of the floppy disk install primordial soup. I think we can do away with this little memetic sub-sub-genre and just go back to calling these games shooters. Well… I would say that except Turbo Overkill is, uh… it’s a little bit of a Doom Eternal clone.

If you’re going to borrow from anything, why not borrow from a modern classic of the FPS genre? Doom Eternal kind of stands alone, even to this day, as a high budget, highly demanding, fast paced shooter with a hefty single player campaign, and it’s not like Turbo Overkill is stealing whole cloth or anything. Rather, TO is cribbing notes on gamefeel, movement, a few points about overall structure, and okay, yes it also has a grappling hook and surprisingly fun platforming challenges.

Broadly speaking, Turbo Overkill is a 3 episode shooter that slowly expands the player’s arsenal while guiding them from one skatepark arena to another with widely spaced navigational challenges tying it all together. It has a charmingly low poly look to it. Chunky enemy models and low res textures make for much needed legibility during high intensity action, but also allows for some truly huge levels, granting an enormous sense of scale that characterizes the experience really well. Cyberpunk fiction tends to emphasize the smallness of the individual as they drown in seas of megacity neon, and though TO casts the player as a galactic savior the humongous levels go a long way in selling that smallness. The interstitial segments between big arena battles also innovate on Doom Eternal by frequently chaining small scale encounters as a means of fleshing out the level design and keeping up a steady flow state as you progress.

Those big skatepark battles are really where TO feels the most like Doom Eternal, where it spawns in wave after wave of meticulously chosen enemy units to craft unique feeling combat challenges. The enemies all feel like the finely carved chess pieces that DE’s director Hugo Martin describes in that game’s dev diaries. There are slow but steady projectile turrets, fast and agile harassers, bishop-like laser emitters, and so on, and they’re all deployed in interesting configurations to really push the player to perform. Unlike DE though, these enemies all tend to lack “hard counters”, specific means of dealing with them that I always felt turned many of DE’s combat sequences into rote games of Simon Says. TO instead provides the player with an ever increasing number of ways to dole out high DPS, refocusing the challenge on threat identification and granting players the freedom to pick out targets to selectively burn down on sight.

Damage dealing is of course a function of the arsenal, and TO’s arsenal is not necessarily the star of the show, but it is one of the main reasons I came to really love it. In terms of form and function, the weapons are actually pretty standard, pistol, shotgun, SMG, rocket launcher, etc. But the game is constantly doling out upgrades and enhancements that give each weapon new utility and refreshing their roles in your constant battles. Once an upgrade is unlocked it’s a lot of fun to start integrating it into normal rotation, finding the gaps in your approaches that can be filled and slowly building a robust offense. It’s in this slow escalation of player expression and power that is the actual star here, the way nearly every level, even into the final levels, will add some new gameplay element, a new weapon, a new upgrade, a new movement option, ever expanding the way you fight and move through the world. And they all feel great!

The chainsaw leg is a great example of how the devil really is in the details, especially because it’s basically the first weapon you get. It totally replaces the typical FPS melee attack, but its use in movement has to truly be felt, especially given the speed at which the game operates. It goes faster on slopes, can be activated in mid-air with a slight boost to speed, and it can be customized to sap health and armor from enemies when killed. But I think the real key is that it just doesn’t do all that much damage. Sure, it can be customized to do a bit MORE damage, but there’s a learned skill to it in gauging the right time to finish off meatier enemies by sawing through them for maximum payoff. In short, it’s a quick and easy action with plenty of utility and high potential for mastery, and it really exemplifies how all the weapons feel good because they are simultaneously cool and useful.

Speaking of cool, the aesthetic of Turbo Overkill was not really a draw to me initially. It deals in a gritty cyberpunk world set to a characteristically synthy soundtrack. Its writing initially strikes a tone echoing older Duke Nukem forays, pulpy and irreverent, and featuring Duke’s original VA Jon St. John as a quippy AI companion. The BGM was the first to win me over. Though it can sometimes sound generic, it’s the quickest aspect to find its own unique footing, bolstered by some intelligently designed reactive sound design that punches up the intensity at just the right moments. Admittedly, only a few levels have tracks that truly stand out, my favorite being a late game casino level with heavy James Bond vibes, but they all do the job and accentuate the action.

I won’t say too much about the story because it rarely ever hit for me in a meaningful way, the protagonist is mute and much of it is told in audio diaries that I usually just wanted to stop, but it certainly hits a major stride in its third episode, which is actually more like half the game. The scale of the story balloons massively at this point, taking you from dirty slums and back alleys to outer space, witnessing gigantic interstellar warfare and vast structures to swing and dash in and around. There’s a real sense that no punches were pulled, there’s nothing saved for the sequel, or teased and left unfulfilled. Turbo Overkill does nothing if not deliver on its premise and take all of its concepts to their natural conclusions. I also can’t call out the talents of Jon St. John as I did earlier without highlighting the amazing work by Gianni Matragrano as one of the major villains, given a major spotlight in the back half and really chewing on the scenery to deliver a memorable performance that’s full of unhinged menace and a touch of whimsy.

When it comes to criticisms, I have only a few for TO, the early to mid game bosses being perhaps the biggest. They range from forgettable to frustrating in that they are going for what I think is supposed to feel like 1v1 PvP matches in games like Quake or Unreal Tournament. Quicksaves are usually disabled during these fights and their rarity made for one-off encounters with nothing to really grasp onto and deliver on. Thankfully, like just about everything else in the game, they get better as you progress, with later bosses actually being kind of a highlight, especially the aforementioned Gianni voiced character, Maw.

My other (exceedingly minor) complaint is that the levels eventually balloon to a size and intensity where I could only comfortably play one per session. The levels are great at packing in a lot of dense details and secrets that are usually fun to hunt for, but I would start to forgo them when even a straightforward playthrough of a level began to take more than 30 minutes. Unfortunately this also means I likely won’t be revisiting these amazingly cool levels anytime soon, despite all the fun bonuses and unlocks that slowly accrue over a playthrough.

I think it’s something of a disservice to label Turbo Overkill as a Boomer Shooter, and I frankly think it’s about time we retire the term entirely. It made sense as a meme to pull people back to a genre that had stagnated in a generation of overserious, brown and yellow tinted, slow paced military style drek, but we’ve had several years now of stellar FPS games running the gamut of styles and attitudes. Turbo Overkill finds its strengths not as some kind of nostalgia baiting throwback but in its slick modernity and carefully plotted escalation, a kind of curation that’s a far cry from old-school titles that would rather throw you straight into the deep end or ask that you RTFM.

I’m simply tired of masquerading as a creaky geriatric, pining for the good old days of DOS and slow internet. We’ve seen more and better shooters in the last few years than at any point in human history and there’s no point in pretending to be jaded about the state of the genre, even as an irony laden unfunny joke. If you want a good First Person Shooter video game, one that’s fast and intense and runs well on modern systems, there’s an absolute buffet of outstanding titles out there, and I’d say Turbo Overkill stands pretty tall amongst them.

Turbo Overkill is one of the few frustratingly good video game experiences I had in my life and this is not a compliment.

TO is NOT a boomer shooter, despite the heavy 80's inspired future setting that mashes Blade Runner, Cyberpunk and many other franchises into one. TO leans heavily into the "Doom Eternal wannabe" territory, and it has every element from that game. Keep in mind, some things are better implemented here than in Doom Eternal but that is usually the case when something tries to improve upon the thing it got inspired from.

So what is the problem with TO? Well, for starters, it is way too long without any interesting story or stakes at all. The story is 3 episodes long, each with a few bosses, different enemies and all that. The main "bad guy" is a virus that combines flesh with metal, converting people into Strogg like creatures, so as you progress through the story, the more grotesque these creatures become.

Fortunetly, your combat arsenal is more than capable of dealing with them as every gun comes with a secondary function that you need to unlock, and even these forms can be upgraded. Your dual SMGs can be one assault rifle, the minigun can be a flamethrower and your sniper can teleport you to your target. All of these are fun to use, punchy and well animated. You even have a leg that turns into a freaking chainsaw, and you can slide around killing everyone in front of you. Too bad you get a seizure while using anything I mentioned.

Yes, the main problem with the game is the gimmick. It is ridden with bright lights, neon, vivid colors and flashing images that after a few hours of playing your eyes will definietly hurt, even if you are used to this kind of stuff. Combine this with the insane amount of speed, and you will 100% need to take a break after 30 minutes.

Even if you find the visuals cool, the game just drags on and on, and you doing the same thing over and over again, without any interesting change. Everything feels polished, everything is technically fine but it is somewhat lacking. You can grab a copy of Turbo Overkill along with other shooters from Humble Bundle right now. Check it out if you are not sensitive of this amount of flashing lights and vivid colors.

Your leg is a chainsaw. 5/5 already.

This game's title is not a lie, it really does some insane shit. Almost every level comes with a new surprise, some new thing that is crazier than anything before it. The movement feels nice (as expected from a movement shooter) and being able to slide mid-air is a nice touch. Turbo Overkill's soundtrack did not disappoint (Sunset Synthetica my beloved).

Some complaints I have: Some boss fights were confusing, some parts feel stretched out for no reason, checkpoints are awkwardly placed in some areas and quicksaves are disabled in some parts which is annoying.

I haven't 100%'ed the game yet, this review will most likely be updated when I have. Also don't start your playthrough on Murder Machine, you will regret it.