fun game, but I think being praised as one of the best boomer shooters of all time is really heavy handed. the shooting feels good but you're pulled away from it way too often and dragged through boring setpieces for it to feel really cohesive (the motorcycle and carship segments specifically)
my biggest issue with the game is the fact that you become overpowered pretty much immediately. playing on the hardest difficulty felt meaningless because you get so souped up on upgrades so quickly that there's never really any point where it feels difficult. you just kind of steamroll through everything and it never gets harder. these games usually excel at giving you a specific toolkit and teaching you how to best utilize that toolkit but turbo overkill just kind of teaches you that sliding is good and that's the entire game

To say I love this game is an understatement, this is one of the best games I have ever played and definitely of the top shooters. This game is fantastic from top to bottom and has given me nothing but pure adrenaline on the difficulty I played it in (Serve Me Pain/Very Hard). The levels were long, but they felt justified as every single battle kept me on edge and required me to use pure skill to overcome. The bosses were all great, constantly giving a new approach to fight them. The game constantly improves, and it doesn't settle down at all. Each episode is wildly improved from the previous, and the third episode amazes me with how great it was. The guns were all satisfying to use, allowing me to strategize accordingly with them and many of which brought a new idea to FPS games as a whole. Words cannot express how much I enjoyed this game, and it is arguably the best modern boomer shooter to date. This game is easily a must play, especially if you love FPS games.

Probably the best retro boomer shooter you're going to find.

The movement is on par with Titanfall's movement. That means it's pretty fucking great. If you use you're movement set to the fullest you're just flying over the map constantly.

The progression of weapons and skills in this game is fucking insane. At the end I was a torso with chainsaw on both my arms and legs shooting micromisiles at huge mechs while in slo-mo.

I really fucking love this game and I don't really know how to put it in words. Just play it.

This is one of the best FPS games of the past decade. Story is serviceable, but it's obviously not trying to sell you on a compelling narrative. Instead Turbo Overkill is another old school style shooter, but instead of being overly reliant on its boomer shooter DNA, it improves everything that works and leaves things that weren’t worth keeping.

Its levels shmoove you through with breeze and even when a level becomes more complex, it never feels convoluted. The game is divided into three episodes with a good chunk of levels to go through, and most of them feel rather visually diverse considering the color palette only relies on blues, grays and reds.

The combat is stellar. I played this on the equivalent to the hard difficulty called “Street Cleaner”, and I found quite a bit of spots when the game genuinely felt like a challenge, but never frustrating. You have a lot of weapons to utilize, but it never forces you to use them all to do well. Augments can heavily affect the way you play through a fight, from giving more damage to just swapping weapons or chainsaws used to deal tons of damage but also keep you alive.

At the end of every episode there is a boss fight, along with some in between. I was somewhat underwhelmed by the final boss of episode one, but oh boy does the game crank up afterwards. I find that many old school shooters tend to struggle with good boss fights and Turbo Overkill's is no slouch, especially the final boss.

It’s pretty rare when an fps game can make me smile often, considering I’ve been into the genre for a long while, but Turbo Overkill had me at many points either grinning or smiling my ass off. If that isn’t high praise then I don’t know what is. Go buy this game.

First the major negative for me, character writing is pretty cringe. A little too much "badass-humor" and tropey cliches for me. And the main antagonist AI is basically a much weaker written Shodan.

Thankfully this is a movement shooter so the writing isn't the important part, the movement and shooting is. The game passes these categories with flying colors.
For movement options, you've got double jumping, dashing, grapple hand, wall-running, and the crown jewel; chainsaw slide. The slide easily being the biggest innovation despite how simple the idea of a damaging slide attack is. But if you spec your traits around it, it becomes both one of the strongest weapons in your arsenal and an ammo replenishing/healing maneuver.
For shooting, the entire arsenal of weapons is both satisfying to use and comes with a series of upgrades. From my own personal play experience, I found myself cycling through each of the weapons throughout the entire duration of the game. Many are given specific advantages over some enemies, a great design choice for making everything feel like it has a use. And even though weapons are paired up and share ammo types, I still found the balance between using them both well thought out too.
The story, while I have my gripes with the dialogue, still leads the player into some great set pieces and successfully amps up the scale with each episode.
Overall, game proved to be an enjoyable movement shooter, and an impressive feat for such a small development team.

Fun old-school style FPS with a lot of combat options & varied environments. I played through on Hard mostly ignoring the secrets & I enjoyed most of my time with the game. My main complaints are that it drags on by the end & it can feel a little bloated with the sheer amount of weapons & upgrades etc. The writing & voice acting does have its small share of moments, although it mostly came off as annoying & hard to stomach. It's obviously intentional & it didn't negatively impact my enjoyment of the game but I had to mention it. One of my favourite little things the game does is the unique intros to the majority of the levels involving some over the top murder.

A fantastic boomer shooter. Really, really fun.
The graphics are nothing special, but the color scheme and the design of the levels are really great.

The OST is full of synthwave bangers

The weapons are your standard Boomer shooter weapons. But you have your chainsaw leg, the principal attraction of the game.

The story is really good. SAMM is a great companion. And the voice actors knock it out of the park.

Really good game overall

Also, the main character has the coolest name ever: Johnny Turbo

In the new wave of retro shooters, this very much goes for the Doom Eternal spectacle mode. Thanks to some clever tricks, it mostly pulls this off, which is especially impressive when you realize only a couple people worked on it.

One of the wildest toolkits you'll find in one of these games, I think it speaks a lot to how well the weapons are designed that the starting pistols ended up being one of my most used tools later on.

One of my only real gripes is the game's way, way too long. Especially in the third episode, I definitely feel like some episodes could have been cut and the game would be better for it.

I have no clue why this game didn't get a pat at TGA at all. Put aside being nominated, it even deserves a solid GOTY in indies. It'll be your new favourite boomer shooter. Lots of player agency, excels at every metrics of a classic FPS shooter. Creative af and incredibly fast. While I agree that there were some pacing issues (some of the levels could have been certainly shorter) I rarely got bored at all during my +10hrs playthrough. It always found a way to innovate itself. Solid gunplay, solid level design, tons of fun and superb references. Sad to see it's still underrated.

And yeah, it's the ultimate chainsaw game. The review would have not been completed without mentioning it.

This game has probably some of the best moment to moment gameplay of the indie boomer shooters out now with 3 problems that make me like it not as much as most of its contemporaries.

1: It is way, way too long. It's about 12 hours long and feels like 20 because every level is like 30 minutes long and every boss has like 9 phases. It's a pacing issue, not a length issue. A lot of padding in each level makes this extra not fun.
2: Explosion damage is weird. It deals like 90% of your health including when your own explosions hit me. Whenever I was in the same zip code as a barrel that blew up, I took damage and usually died instantly from near full health.
3: The color palate is ugly as hell. Everything is bright, bright red and in the rare instance that it's not virtual boy core it's dark blue or black. It's mind numbing. Near the end of the game there's a level without a red filter on it and it feels so fresh and new because I'd spent 10 hours in the red zone.

These are big complaints and I feel like on a lesser game they would kill it outright. Thankfully, Turbo Overkill has some insanely good combat. Feels like a more versatile doom eternal combat system where you're constantly weapon swapping, and I absolutely loved the arena design in this game. It's an easy recommend, I just don't think it's the best indie boomshoot like some others do.

Levels are a bit too long and I think the game could have done a bit more to encourage players to use advanced strategies, but if you're already an experienced movement-shooter fan like me, you're in the perfect position to love this game.

The ability to slide anywhere - even in midair - for huge boosts of speed doesn't really get old. The weapons are mostly fantastic and versatile, but this still doesn't quite have that masterful, slick "dance" feeling of DOOM Eternal. I know this is extreme competition, but it's just how I feel.

I'm sure this would be amazing after a few repeat runs on even higher difficulties (I played on Hard, but there are two more above that), but again, the pacing of the levels kind of turns me off from wanting to do that anytime soon. Sometimes it's a bit hard to tell where I'm going, or where I've already been, too.

Overall excellent game that I'd highly recommend to any fans of intense movement and weapon-swap combos, I just hope any future games from this developer have some stronger level design.

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.