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.
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.