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.

So I had a previous review that was a bit more negative on the game and very similar to my lame shitpost review of Xenoblade 2 where I simply said "objectively better than the first game." I feel I was a bit too harsh on Iceborne then. Now a lot of the problems I had back then are still there but 3 years away from this exclusively playing Rise and Sunbreak definitely helped in giving me a newfound outlook for Monster Hunter World and Iceborne. Especially the latter.

Post Monster Hunter 3 I haven't really disliked any Monster Hunter game. 3 has a really lackluster roster, but I understand why it was like that. I don't like it, but I get it. P3rd on though? Banger after banger full on 10 on 10 games baby. P3rd? Banger. 3U? Banger. 4U? ALL TIMER THE POPEYES CHICKEN OF MH. Gen? Banger. GU? Banger. World would be the first one to really sort of shake up this streak for me as while I never did find the game terrible I always felt it was lacking something. A sort of charm the previous games had that the 5th generation wouldn't really bring back until Rise. Iceborne only exacerbated this despite the return of some of the more vibrant and odd monsters from older games. Didn't stop me from putting over 2K hours and now another 295 into it with this replay lmfaooo.

So yeah getting it out of the way now. Iceborne is a bit of a janky load still. The clutch claw sucks. This is a lukewarm take, but man does it suck having to do this to even make WEX work. The movement of the characters also feels really off compared to the previous games and even Rise. There's a bit of that Rockstar Euphoria bullshit going on where I feel some control responses take like 3 hours at times and cool I just got one shot by Fatalis epic. I'd talk about the deco grinding (still sucks), Guiding Lands (kill me), or the FOMO events, but those are mostly a nonissue now. If you're playing MHWI in 2023 (enjoy by the way if you got it on the current sale that shit is a steal) none of these things will really matter as naturally grinding out what you want or deco events may just get you decent decos. For The Guiding Lands unless you really want to augment some gear (and there's no reason to really care about attack and health augments I didn't use any at all this playthrough) you can just avoid it besides the mandatory story quests or Raging Brachydios event (one of the best fights). FOMO events nonexistent since Fatalis dropped back in late 2020 and the game is so much better for it. This is what it should have been all along and it rules. Yeah I still have my issues with some annoying shit. Why does the game punish me for playing good by having that dumb Rajang wall grab and Fatalis falling over knock me down? But the good out weighs the bad. Also while I find Rise's art direction to be much better as I feel MH should be a very stylized (yet realistic) franchise I can definitely at least say that the environments in this game are gorgeous and the HDR is so goooood when you figure out how to make it work. Just the wonderful contrast and colors you can give it. On a technical level yeah World is genuinely impressive especially for a PS4 game, and now on PS5 with the minimized loadtimes and unbroken 60fps lordy... All that paired with the amount of content makes this at this point in time one of the most bang for your buck games. If you've ever been interested in Monster Hunter and wanted an idea of what the franchise is then yes this is the game to play. I may prefer Rise and feel in many ways it is more representative of the franchise as a whole post Tri (goofy yet earnest) World is the game Wilds will definitely build off of more than the former even if it takes some elements from it.

It's a bit of a mess (why is Nergigante turned into Monsterverse Godzilla and why are the ledges so fucking annoying and why are the maps so tight and cramped) and some things really feel like the devs at times are trying to counter the player trying to have any fun (CC tenderizing), but MHWI is in my opinion still one of the gold standards of what a AAA release should be. This doesn't just end at release content wise, but in post launch content with free additional monsters and events to keep the game alive. Yeah it may not be the best MH, but I'm thinking it's a pretty damn good game.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll be playing Monster Hunter Rise and the older ones until Wilds releases alongside any other games I want to play.

To me, Rabi Ribi is a masterpiece, and one of my favorite games of all time. It's hard as nails, has tons of fun secrets, a deep combat system, and freedom of exploration in a genre known for overwhelming players with what they can’t do. It's easy to see just how much it bucked traditional metroidvania trends from just playing it for a few minutes. You start the game with two wall jumps, you unlock most of your combat abilities very fast, and Quick Drop provides quite decent mobility from the beginning. What made Rabi Ribi stand out was that it was indulgent in a way that spoke to GemaYue’s particular design sense. It was confident -- it knew what it was and challenged you to get on its wavelength. As a result, it was often obtuse, with major mechanics being left up entirely to player discovery, a bold philosophy you can only get from a genuinely passionate capital G Gamer who wants to share his vision of fun to the world; one reminiscent of games before the Internet spoiled their every little secret.

Maybe you're expecting me to start bemoaning Tevi’s lack of ‘soulkino’ or whatever right about now, but really, even though it sacrificed the freedom and intentional jank for more curation and tutorializing, this is a great follow-up to Rabi Ribi from a gameplay perspective. There are more helping hands to accommodate new players, like Core Expansion, numerous sources of healing, bosses being more exploitable, and the existence of Golden Dodge, but it's still a challenging, and most importantly, FUN experience due to all of the new toys at your disposal. The combat depth, for one, is technically leagues above Rabi Ribi. The sheer number of Sigils, while cumbersome at times, opens up a plethora of builds to pursue, from pure melee to pure ranged to hybrid to bomb focused to combo focused, etc, and they always give you new things to think about when interacting with the mechanics. Rabi Ribi was also about the flow of dodge boss pattern > unleash big combo > prepare for boss’ retaliation > repeat, and I like that both games encourage you to keep the pressure up even during boss attacks for the sake of that all-important combo rank, but with Tevi, the moment you go in to do your thing while the boss is vulnerable, the world is your oyster. Do an airdash, smack them a few times, spanner ground pound, whirlwind spinny, airdash quintuple flash, big spanner whack, backflip, throw knives that inflict a debuff, unleash a few charge shots, whatever. This is like crack to my Rabi poisoned brain. It is every bit as gratifying as I expected.

So yes, the game was worth the wait for this combat system alone, but the movement is great too. It thankfully retains a lot of the same movement tech from its predecessor (as well as some new ones -- I hope Love Bunny retains the Quick Drop bounce idea), which makes exploring a blast. It helps that the map is freaking huge this time around, and the areas that comprise it are all quite varied and pretty to look at, with another banger soundtrack to boot. Rabi Ribi’s map was more a vehicle to connect the various bosses together, and if you found issue with that, Tevi has environmental hazards and devilish enemy placement in spades. The secrets aren’t messing around either -- it was rarely immediately obvious how to approach them (but they were still more fun to collect in Rabi Ribi due to its ‘jank’ and important gear like airdash accessible early on). Although Tevi's locales are more entertaining overall, sifting through such a massive map for items diminishes my willingness to 100% the game again, but it nonetheless gives players plenty of extrinsic motivation to explore, as not only does uncovering map tiles reward XP, but the potential resources are too useful to pass up especially on the hardest difficulties. I thought I would be annoyed by the crafting system, but it’s actually quite an elegant alternative to Rabi Ribi’s admittedly odd, loose idea of progression. You no longer need to look to enemy grinding for money, and the resources which gate item upgrades and Sigil crafting are supplied at a reasonably steady rate. If you just play through the game normally, it’s likely you will be able to fully upgrade everything well before its conclusion, though it’s not like you even need to outside of a few specific ones, as they’re mostly modular stat boosts. This heavy injection of Game Design™, for better or worse, makes Tevi feel like a more standard metroidvania experience. If you want, you can go out of your way to snag every buff potion available, equip all the powerful Sigils, upgrade your equipment, and craft all the strongest healing items, but if you want a challenge, you need to dip your toes into self-imposed handicaps. Rabi Ribi, on the other hand, never allowed the player to become too powerful due to its level scaling mechanic, which was a necessary evil to ensure the game was reasonably beatable on low item% runs while also allowing bosses to become unspeakable hellspawns when players have everything except excuses to fall back on. Tevi ditched this intense boss scaling and instead decided to tie only Bunny Potions to item%, which is a sensible move. However, because I autistically searched every nook and cranny, the game became a cakewalk around Chapter 5 (yes, on Expert mode), which kind of surprised me, but that's not to say it’s bad design, I mean, I was rewarded for my exploration. I’m just a weirdo who likes my games unreasonably hard, so Rabi Ribi’s approach is more my speed. Speaking of difficulty, Tevi unfortunately commits a similar error to Rabi Ribi by forcing players to finish the game before its hardest difficulty is unlocked, which I will never understand the point of. I guess I would want to die if I were forced to manually skip the million cutscenes before each boss a bunch more times.

Actually, on that note…

Tevi suffers from one major problem that Rabi Ribi doesn’t, and I feel it will ultimately be what strengthens my allegiance to that game as superior. Tevi doesn’t know when to shut up. Characters talk talk talk, going on and on about the lore, with endless exposition and meaningless tangents, and the dialogue is not well written enough to justify it. Neither is the story as a whole, unfortunately, despite the occasionally inspired idea. This makes it all the more frustrating because the game is entirely beholden to its story, resulting in poorer map design decisions. Sure, while a cute & charming vibe, Rabi Ribi’s plot was the furthest thing from a literary masterpiece, but at least it wasn’t an active hindrance, and the little dialogue it did have was straight and to the point. There were almost no gates between you and enjoying the game. To think that Tevi went through all this trouble to design itself around such a disappointingly barebones, subpar story is just sad, frankly. The silver lining to all this is the Free Roam and Speedrun options, which, personally, as someone who’s currently going through the game again on Speedrun mode, make the previous experience feel like a prison. I love Tevi -- when I actually get to play it, that is. Your first time through will be affronted with a plague of text boxes which may as well say “NO FUN ALLOWED” copy and pasted hundreds of times. I just couldn’t bring myself to care. Rabi Ribi has better writing than Tevi, and I will die on that hill.

GemaYue is a genius game designer, and next time, hopefully in a direct sequel to Rabi Ribi, his abilities can shine unrestrained by a story he is being compelled to tell. Until then, at the very least, I am enjoying the post-game modes more than the initial playthrough, and I trust that it will get several good DLCs in the future.

Did you know that it is against the law to say anything bad about Bloodborne? It's true. If you ever even think about how it would've been better as an action game rather than trying to be like a Souls game, you'll see police officers outside your house. They'll say you have the right to remain silent and that anything you say can and will be used against you. But that doesn't scare you. You shriek as they drag you away about how it's not fun making a build for a weapon you only get after beating the final boss. As you're waiting in your cell, your provided attorney will try and work out a plea bargain, claiming that at the very least you did play the game for 300+ hours on your PlayStation 4, way more than the weekly amount that all PlayStation 4 owners are required by law to play. While on trial however, you lash out. You say that it's not fair that Bloodborne can't even be ported over to PC, and that not getting an FPS boost for PlayStation 5 is even more outrageous. The judge bangs his gavel. You've dug your grave. You find yourself some years later, serving a life sentence because you couldn't play ball and just have fun with your hyper Lovecraftian atmospheric action adventure game. Guards walk by your cell and wince, and your fellow prisoners whisper nothing good about you. They're intimidated by you. And not because you were so brave to say that Bloodborne has flaws. But because of the same repeated phrase you have carved all over your cell. A phrase that only says... “cummmfpk”.

First things first, I'm gonna go on record and say that the japanese version of this game is the way to go. Not only did the western version double the difficulty of everything, it also... neglected to translate any of the dialogue and cutscenes from the japanese version, so it just chucks them out altogether. There's a fan translation of this version of the game, and I wholeheartedly recommend it over what the west half-heartedly gave us.

With that said, Dynamite Headdy is the type of game where even through several completed playthroughs, I'm still kinda struggling to wrap my thoughts around it. It's like a platformer, with the pacing of a run 'n gun. That is to say, it almost feels like I'm supposed to play more methodically, but the game is just blasting through its mechanics and setpieces at such a rapid-fire pace that I feel like I'm not being given time to digest any of it.

Despite this, I can't help but admire the creativity on display. Headdy leans headdily into its stage play aesthetic, far more than Mario 3 ever did. Every stage is an act of a play, filled with blatant props substituting the sky, spotlights, behind the scenes background elements, and - on a side note - the occasional ridiculously high-quality voice clip that made me double take my prior understanding of what the Genesis sound chip could handle.

This is a Treasure title, through and through. Their technical prowess, penchant for weirdness, and thrilling setpieces are all present here, and are all worth experiencing. It's just... it feels like there's a difference between me thinking "This game is really cool," versus "This game is fun to play," the latter of which I don't find myself thinking as much. It's not bad to play either, nor is it clunky. Maybe the problem is that whereas the aesthetic is very focused, the gameplay is not. There's tons of powerups, but few of them contribute towards a fun flow of movement that I normally expect out of platformers. Headdy carries no momentum, no running button, he isn't much more other than servicable to play as.

It's the kind of situation where the style of the game carries everything else. And man, if there's anything that'll win you over, it's the style. The amount of scenarios present here are all wild and crazy beyond all imagination. And yet, for all it does, there's just that one tiny thing missing that makes me wonder if the simplicity of the controls not matching up to the complexity of the level variety creates an awkward balance of design priority. In the sense that the gameplay and the variety should've been equally prioritized, but clearly, one thing took precedence, and thus Headdy winds up as "fun enough," but could it have been more fun?

Yeah, again, it's difficult for me to collect my thoughts on Headdy. I love what it's doing, I highly respect it just for being a game that the developers had complete freedom over. But it feels like it's doing too much within too little time, and I guess it makes it difficult to keep a lot of it in your memory once you're done. Perhaps that's not a bad thing, though. It just means that my next playthrough is going to still feel fresh.