Turbo Overkill's damage calculus works against the game very hard. All attacks (and I mean all, your attacks and enemy attacks) either do inconsequential damage or instantly kill the target. From the player side, this means most weapons are not worth caring about. Out of an arsenal of 10 weapons, only 4 are generally applicable to combat. There's nothing wrong with a 4 weapon arsenal necessarily, but why were the other 6 added? For a damage niche that that doesn't exist? To add resources to an already over-saturated ammo economy where you have to try to run out of bullets? The remaining 4 weapons are effective, but they're SO effective that basic use with the player's abilities would make most combat encounters arbitrarily easy. It at least makes most individual fights not worth thinking about.
I say 'would' because getting grazed by anything larger than you is usually an instant kill. Turbo Overkill gets some grace here because its respawn time is refreshingly low, and a majority of enemies are the man-sized ones who only exist to pad level enemy counts, so it's a manageable problem from a play perspective. The issue is the breakpoint instant kills create means most resource management is meaningless. If everything important kills you in one shot, why bother having health or armor? Players that figure this out can probably spec into a very effective glass-cannon playstyle, which is cool! But I feel that Turbo Overkill expects player health to be a much more closely managed resource. If players were supposed to be gibbed so fast by enemies, why are Rammers the only enemies with non-visual attack queues?
And, you know, getting the death BSOD with no feedback is kinda annoying.
Turbo Overkill's gameplay does not have a middle ground between being alive and not, but provides tools that are applied almost exclusively to that middle ground. The game wants to give the players tools to explore gameplay depth that doesn't exist. The best the player can do is autopilot between threat vectors until every enemy worth caring about is dead or they've been respawned.
There're a lot of other problems with Turbo Overkill regarding its movement being weird and contextually sluggish, and its presentation being kinda sloppy, and the writing being really not that great, but the whole "complexity-erasing damage" thing is the big one to me.
I say 'would' because getting grazed by anything larger than you is usually an instant kill. Turbo Overkill gets some grace here because its respawn time is refreshingly low, and a majority of enemies are the man-sized ones who only exist to pad level enemy counts, so it's a manageable problem from a play perspective. The issue is the breakpoint instant kills create means most resource management is meaningless. If everything important kills you in one shot, why bother having health or armor? Players that figure this out can probably spec into a very effective glass-cannon playstyle, which is cool! But I feel that Turbo Overkill expects player health to be a much more closely managed resource. If players were supposed to be gibbed so fast by enemies, why are Rammers the only enemies with non-visual attack queues?
And, you know, getting the death BSOD with no feedback is kinda annoying.
Turbo Overkill's gameplay does not have a middle ground between being alive and not, but provides tools that are applied almost exclusively to that middle ground. The game wants to give the players tools to explore gameplay depth that doesn't exist. The best the player can do is autopilot between threat vectors until every enemy worth caring about is dead or they've been respawned.
There're a lot of other problems with Turbo Overkill regarding its movement being weird and contextually sluggish, and its presentation being kinda sloppy, and the writing being really not that great, but the whole "complexity-erasing damage" thing is the big one to me.