Firstly, the art style for this game is amazing and the pixel style works well with lower polygon models. The game's core gameplay of being a movement shooter is simply fun. However, the game struggles to introduce anything that feels really unique, especially in the gunplay and enemy design. The guns are also unbalanced. The game's difficulty is not balanced well either. It is too easy most of the time and its "difficult sections" are just you being outnumbered by a ton, which can't be fun at times.
Final score: 7/10

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.

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.

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.

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.

This might be the best singer-player FPS I've ever played. Better than Titanfall 2, Doom Eternal, or any other great in the genre.

I'll admit the story is flimsy but it's really only there to set up some increased platforming & action setpices. The gunplay is absolutely perfect and it's arsenal is as inventive as it is functional. I'm going to gush about this game a lot but first some critiques.

This is a classic boomer shooter, so if you're not down for running at 100mph & never reloading, this may be too much for you. In fact, it was almost too much for me and I love these kinds of games. I had to tone down the difficulty from normal to the easiest level twice because I felt I just died too quickly to react. Some enemies, especially near the end when they appear in groups, can wipe away your entire health bar in one hit. You get a dodge, a grappling hook (that can set enemies on fire), a double jump with additional modifiers, and sometimes environmental movement enhancers like jump pads, so it's usually easy to dodge tougher enemies. But when the game purposely locks you in tiny rooms, it can be rough. And that is especially true in the final level when time limits are introduced.

The upgrade systems here are satisfying, though simple. Killing certain random enemies will make them drop money which is used to by modifications for your limbs & head or weapon upgrades. It may seem like it'll take a while to unlock them all, but you'll have all of them early into the final (3rd) episode. This means that for roughly the final 25% of the game leaves you with nothing to spend your money. This is fine because it feels like you've finally reached your final form at that point, but I wish I didn't have a functionality pointless number continuing to go up in the final levels.

There's controller support, and I played the entire game on Steam Deck. It was nearly flawless, but it takes some tweaking to get everything mapped in a way that feels comfortable. In particular, it was hard finding a place to map all of your special powers (slow motion, micro missiles, grappling hook) as at least 2 of them are abilities that you'll need to aim while using. These abilities make sense for the shoulder buttons, but you also have alt-fires & weapon swapping up there usually, so you may have to get creative (thank God for the weapon wheel).

And finally, I understand this is an indie game so I don't want to go too hard on this point, but I've gotten hard stuck twice due to checkpoint-related glitches. Luckily all I needed to do was restart the level, but considering these both happened in the final levels, I had to replay sections that I barely completed in the first place. Plus, because the game is so hard, I find myself trying to outsmart the game and trying to access health & ammo that should have been locked behind previous doors, which is the very reason one of my glitches happened. When the game can be this difficult, it encourages cheesing, so maybe a tweaked difficulty could change that. Hell, it really is only a few specific fights that were rough, so maybe just check those encounters. Also, this game could use some kind of more prominent "danger zone" warning state similar to Doom Eternal. In that game you rarely died in one hit, if at all, in normal. You'd at least get knocked into a fragile state & had a split second to recover. You almost never get that split second in Turbo Overkill, and perhaps if I had ot I never would have been frustrated in certain moments.

But the rest of this game FUCKS SO HARD.

You get every gun under the sun it feels like. A sniper, 2 different shotguns, SMGs, an LMG/flamethrower, a plasma rifle, rocket launcher, and orbital Lazer, & chainsaw arms (which are charged by killing enemies with your chainsaw leg). Every weapon feeling great to use (especially if you turn on hit markers) and with a moderate exception to the plasma rifle, every weapon has heavy utility. And despite how frustrating they were initially, the timed fights forced me to find the most effective weapon for each enemy. I couldn't just pick a weapon and stick with it, I had to react to every specific encounter.

I mentioned weapon upgrades and body augmentations earlier and I gotta say they're mostly fucking incredible. Body mods can do simple things like give more mod slots, extend slow-mo times, or give health or armor when killing with your chainsaw leg. Or they can give you crazy useful perks like igniting enemies with your grappling hook, adding a second chainsaw leg, or giving yourself the ability to wall jump once before touching the ground. In some cases, weapon mods just fix an initial flaw with a weapon, like eliminating the chain gun's windup. But sometimes the entire use case of a weapon is changed. For example, x the starting pistols can be upgraded to (after landing enough shots consecutively) transform into a magnum that does more damage than any other gun in the game. And it stays that way until you finally miss a shot. The variety of these upgrades is insane and takes the power fantasy of the gameplay up to 11.

I mention that there's a story, but it's nothing special. It's very campy in an 80s way, and tonally it's humor is very Duke Nukem (but with none of the meanness of Forever). It makes for fun cutscenes at least, and many of them show off the impressive level & character design.

Oh yeah, I forgot that this game is BEAUTIFUL. It has a PS1 look to it, but so many detailed enemies get jammed into such massive & detailed arenas that it's hard not to be impressed with the game in context of modern releases. It might be working with half the polygons when it comes to texture, but they lean on vibrant colors, insane boss design, and varied level design to stick out.

There's even more I could talk about, like how great the platforming sections are and how they feel like if Titanfall 2 & Doom Eternal had a baby, or how satisfying it is to rain fire from above thanks to the forgiving floatiness of its jumps, or how satisfyingly hidden the collectibles are, or how brilliantly the scale & stakes of the game escalate throughout, or how there's apparently community maps to play now that I'm done, or how the audio logs gives some surprisingly tender back story. But, I gotta go to bed I've been up for nearly 24 hours.

So I'll just say that if you've ever enjoyed a Boomer Shooter (any game like Dusk, Doom Eternal, Ultrakill, etc.) then this is a must-play. I'll be surprised if this isn't on my top 10 of the year.

I've been cursed the whole game:
-The first weapon bugs out in the first level (pressing alt fire, not holding it, makes the animation loop without a way to regain control again until you pick up another weapon).
-The script is not working.
-Enemies are leaving the barrier so you can't remove said barrier.
-The previous checkpoint overrides the current one.
-The elevator of the final boss doesn't go back down after dropping me when it was ascending (thank God the developer thought of putting a console command).
-Getting stuck in geometry with no way out

Other than this, the game, in general, is insanely frustrating with the rocket instantly killing you even if you are at 200 HP or you get hit with the poison slime ball. God forbid you dash over, OVER, your own fire. The level design goes from being big just for the sake of it, "here's an area full of mobs" to no clear exit. The vehicle sections were boring and overpowered to the point that you need to try to fail these sections. There's no reason to use certain guns except for their alt fire, and even then, there are like four guns you could use the whole game and finish it. So the game has a solution: corruption rooms, where you can't leave the room until you kill every enemy with a weapon selected for you.
the story was mid, that's it.

People say this game is a movement shooter, MORE LIKE BOWEL MOVEMENT SHOOTER WHAT WERE THEY THNIKING?

Enjoyed this quite a bit at Early Access release and that enjoyment still holds strong. Some really creative mechanics throw any idea of grounded out the window, and it was great feeling that same rush that something like Doom Eternal gave me. Feels like a rare feeling.

A few issues here and there though that stop it from going higher. Namely, objectives are a little annoying to find at times (boomer shooter classic lol), and some enemy moves are frustrating to deal with.

Still highly recommend for shooter fans.

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.

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.

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.

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.