Previews
[Hands-On Preview] The Fast-Paced Cyberpunk-Styled ‘Turbo Overkill’ is a Violent, Pulsating Throwback Shooter
It doesn’t take long for Trigger Happy Interactive’s Turbo Overkill to start showing off, and in fairness, it has every reason to do so. A throwback first-person shooter set in the future where its protagonist, the suitably 90s man/machine hybrid known as Johhny Turbo, zips up, down, and around its neon-drenched Paradise city like an oiled pebble going down a slide. Turbo slays augmented goons with two barrels of smoking justice and a slice of his chainsaw leg just as easily as one might write their signature.
Johnny Turbo returns home to the city of Paradise and discovers its population under the digital thumb of a rogue A.I. called Syn. Not only does Syn have the public enslaved, but it also decided to deploy an army of biomechanical baddies for good measure. Armed with his own nifty set of augments, Johnny sets out to take down Syn and its minions, battle bounty hunters, save Paradise, and earn a hefty cash reward in the process.
I must admit, I’m an easy mark for flashy, over-the-top shooters, but that doesn’t mean I’d be incapable of cynicism and criticism toward Turbo Overkill if it was relying solely on being flashy and over-the-top. There’s got to be some meat on its tech-infused bones if it is to keep the pace and not end up huffing and puffing on the sidelines in the long term.
Fittingly for a game with a cyberpunk aesthetic, Turbo Overkill welds modern tricks onto its more traditional first-person frame. There are chunks of Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem, Titanfall, Bulletstorm, and Vanquish here, among other influences, and the challenge of stapling those chunks together and creating a passable whole is a tricky one. Obviously, no modern game can pretend it’s born of a wholly original idea, but the risk of loudly declaring what ideas and styles you’ve plucked parts of your game from are inciting direct comparisons.
What helps Turbo Overkill, in this regard, is that the parts that are chosen largely work together seamlessly, and with the game’s lightning pace, there’s barely a nanosecond to think about such things in the moment. Johnny has one a hell of a toolset to begin with, and it only improves with progression. The aforementioned chainsaw leg adds some extra kick to erm… kicking foes, but his arm-mounted rockets, wall-running prowess, and slow-mo ‘Hero Time’ power heat up the spice levels further still.
It’s in the combination of Johnny’s abilities and weaponry that Turbo Overkill finds its ultraviolent rhythm. The flow of platforming, parkour, and combat takes a little getting used to at the start, but soon it clicks and that almost trance-like ‘zone’ I used to get in during Quake games suddenly materialized. To an observer, it must look almost effortless as Johnny leaps across boats docked in a dreary harbor, thundering along rain-soaked streets, slide-tackling foes chainsaw leg-first, and gibbing enemies to the beat of a crunchy electro-rock soundtrack. The word that kept coming to mind was ‘pulsating’. Turbo Overkill doesn’t just use Late 90s/Early 2000s FPS nostalgia for the sake of a hook, it utilizes the exact feeling of how it plays at its best. A snarling, slick chimera of my favorite old-school shooters in new packaging.
It’d go nowhere without a good set of weapons though, and even in the preview stages of Turbo Overkill, there’s a tasty arsenal to try out. Johnny’s dual magnums are the starting weapons, and while they’re perfectly fine for punching holes into cybernetic chests normally, there’s an alt-fire that tracks and targets enemies to deliver more lethal, insta-gibbing shots. This alt-fire ethos continues throughout. There’s a shotgun that has a plasma blast, another that has a grenade launcher, the Uzi can switch between focused fire and dual-wield, and a minigun that doubles as a flamethrower. There’s a satisfying punch to these weapons, accentuated further by the glorious spray of blood and gore as enemies explode.
Johnny may fly through Paradise at a canter, but it’s still hard to ignore the scuzzy neon beauty of the city along the way. The throwback art and level design are complemented by dazzling lighting that dances off the otherwise grim, rainswept cityscape, and a distinct visual flavor to the world and its freaky inhabitants. The Cyberpunk/Blade Runner aesthetic is fast becoming overused in video games, but when it’s deeply entrenched in a game’s design on multiple levels like it is here, then it becomes a lot easier to remember how good it can feel.
So far, Turbo Overkill is doing exactly what it needs to by making me want more of its blood and neon bullet ballet. It could certainly do with a little tweak here and there to keep the speed, but make falling into bodies of water less of a pace-spoiling experience, but otherwise, it’s already shaping up to be a delicious slice of frenetic old-school shooting joy.
Turbo Overkill preview code for PC provided by the publisher.
Turbo Overkill is due for release in 2022 on all major platforms.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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