"Turbo Overkill stars Johnny Turbo. It is a FPS where you gib enemies with your chainsaw leg, torch foes with the alt fire of your two cylinder chaingun, have a orbital space laser at your disposal that turns everything to ash, can shoot flaming buzzsaws that saw anything in half, explode bad guys with your grenade launcher alt fire with your double barrel boomstick, and a sniper rifle that allows you to telefrag into a enemy on command." And I only made one of those things up.
Let me just say right off the bat: despite this being a fast paced retro-style FPS with the word "Kill" in its title, this is nothing like UltraKill. This is Doom Eternal instead. A Doom Eternal that's, somehow, even faster then ever but doesn't have the same level of enemy complexity and resource management. This mostly has to do with ammo management, which is far more lenient then in Eternal. It'd be tempting to say that's a flaw, but it's simply less demanding in what is most optimal for every combat encounter. While I don't agree personally, some criticized Doom Eternal for having "right" choices when it comes to what weapon to use against which enemy. Something like casting ice magic against a fire enemy, very simple problem that solves itself with little room for deviation. I feel Doom Eternal is more of a dial of "Good" and "Bad" choices, but I do understand where people are coming from when they say they feel limited in what the game asks from them, especially when they keep running out of ammo. Turbo Overkill has nine weapons with a alt-fire for each, and apart from a few, ammo is generally fairly plentiful. Alt-fires do cost more ammo in exchange for higher rewards, but this leads to combat feeling more free-flowing that asks you "How do you want go about making the walls red tonight?"
That isn't to imply this game is overly simple, the base combat certainly is more complex then the original Doom by a wide margin. To partially spoil the guessing game I had at the beginning of this review, the chainsaw leg is your primary ammo-less weapon at your disposal. A lightning fast dash that instant-kills any small humanoids. This game has purchasable and unlockable augments that allows you customize your own Johnny, one of the most important being the augments that grant health and armor upon killing with the chainsaw leg. This gives similar experience to utilizing lesser demons from Eternal that were glorified resource piñatas. It has the same scramble feeling when you're near death and start desperately searching for these lesser foes, while dodging the far more threatening monsters shooting lasers and a hail of bullets. You also have a arm missile that you can lock-on to many enemies at once for a rain of homing missiles, or lock to only one enemy for a much stronger single missile. It's on a relatively long timer, but it deals a ridiculous amount of damage which makes it ideal to remove/weaken the more troublesome monsters off the board. And do you like weapon swapping to bypass gun recoil animations from Doom Eternal? Well you'll feel right at home with how freeing swapping weapons feel, not needing to go through any animation you don't want to sit through (except flipping off foes after a missile launch, which is kind of hilarious how that's the only animation you can't skip). One particular augment takes the weapon swapping a step further then even Eternal, but I'll leave that one a secret.
Enemies hit really hard to compensate the versatility of Johnny Turbo. Checkpoints can be very generous, but there are times where I went 100% to 20% health in a blink of an eye (I played on Hard, there are two higher difficulties above that. One of which just says "Don't" in its description if you try to pick it). Hell, sometimes I'd be dead in that split second. You have two dashes and two jumps by default, plus the aforementioned chainsaw slide, and the game expects you to be moving always. I feel the difficulty curve is generally pretty good, though the Episode 2 bosses was where it starts expecting a lot more from the player. Some parts can be a huge endurance round where you'll be on the edge of life and death at all times. The final few levels especially throw everything and the kitchen sink at you.
Levels can go on for a long time with hundreds of enemies in each one. Sometimes it feels like a joke the devs are in on: "Hey this seems like a lot of enemies... add more." You can even get a cheat to multiply enemy spawns by threefold, which is honestly hilarious by that point. Oh right, each level has three chips and three cassette tapes that unlock cheats and hidden levels respectfully. Because of your insane mobility and the length of these stages, a lot of these collectables can be borderline too well hidden. It wasn't uncommon to spend close to 30 minutes in a single level, only to miss half of the collectables despite my best efforts. Thankfully they aren't required by any means, they're just for fun and extra content. And you don't need to find them on one clean run, the game saves every collectible you pick-up.
The story here, while nothing new or thought-provoking, knows what it is the whole way through. It knows when to ramp up its silliness to the logical extreme, but also knows when to throw a curve ball that forces the heroes in a difficult situation. Its got style and attitude a plenty, maybe a little juvenile with the amount middle fingers and f-bombs thrown left and right, but it never feels artificial nor boring. And this probably has one of the only walk-and-talk sections in any game you can skip, holy shit why is this not standard? The amount humor thrown in this game is the cherry on top. I like the enemy descriptions in the bestiary that were written by a guy who clearly has a grudge against several enemies. I like some of the silly graffiti on the way in most levels of this cyberpunk dystopian that can feel like it was drawn by bored teenagers. And I especially love how bizarre and ludicrous these weapons can get. The dual uzis you get early on allows you to turn one of the uzis into a more accurate two-handed rifle, but instead of putting the other gun away Johnny will just toss the extra onto the floor where it becomes a game object with physics. Little details like that makes the personality of a game shine.
It feels this game has been going under the radar, and that's a crying shame since this game goes really freakin hard. Far harder then it has any right to. The set pieces are some of the best of any in its genre, and the gameplay is top tier in its execution and systems. Even if it can get frustrating with some endgame sections, I'm willing to look past it because of how much more this game gets right.
And you can gib enemies with your chainsaw leg.
I rest my case.
Let me just say right off the bat: despite this being a fast paced retro-style FPS with the word "Kill" in its title, this is nothing like UltraKill. This is Doom Eternal instead. A Doom Eternal that's, somehow, even faster then ever but doesn't have the same level of enemy complexity and resource management. This mostly has to do with ammo management, which is far more lenient then in Eternal. It'd be tempting to say that's a flaw, but it's simply less demanding in what is most optimal for every combat encounter. While I don't agree personally, some criticized Doom Eternal for having "right" choices when it comes to what weapon to use against which enemy. Something like casting ice magic against a fire enemy, very simple problem that solves itself with little room for deviation. I feel Doom Eternal is more of a dial of "Good" and "Bad" choices, but I do understand where people are coming from when they say they feel limited in what the game asks from them, especially when they keep running out of ammo. Turbo Overkill has nine weapons with a alt-fire for each, and apart from a few, ammo is generally fairly plentiful. Alt-fires do cost more ammo in exchange for higher rewards, but this leads to combat feeling more free-flowing that asks you "How do you want go about making the walls red tonight?"
That isn't to imply this game is overly simple, the base combat certainly is more complex then the original Doom by a wide margin. To partially spoil the guessing game I had at the beginning of this review, the chainsaw leg is your primary ammo-less weapon at your disposal. A lightning fast dash that instant-kills any small humanoids. This game has purchasable and unlockable augments that allows you customize your own Johnny, one of the most important being the augments that grant health and armor upon killing with the chainsaw leg. This gives similar experience to utilizing lesser demons from Eternal that were glorified resource piñatas. It has the same scramble feeling when you're near death and start desperately searching for these lesser foes, while dodging the far more threatening monsters shooting lasers and a hail of bullets. You also have a arm missile that you can lock-on to many enemies at once for a rain of homing missiles, or lock to only one enemy for a much stronger single missile. It's on a relatively long timer, but it deals a ridiculous amount of damage which makes it ideal to remove/weaken the more troublesome monsters off the board. And do you like weapon swapping to bypass gun recoil animations from Doom Eternal? Well you'll feel right at home with how freeing swapping weapons feel, not needing to go through any animation you don't want to sit through (except flipping off foes after a missile launch, which is kind of hilarious how that's the only animation you can't skip). One particular augment takes the weapon swapping a step further then even Eternal, but I'll leave that one a secret.
Enemies hit really hard to compensate the versatility of Johnny Turbo. Checkpoints can be very generous, but there are times where I went 100% to 20% health in a blink of an eye (I played on Hard, there are two higher difficulties above that. One of which just says "Don't" in its description if you try to pick it). Hell, sometimes I'd be dead in that split second. You have two dashes and two jumps by default, plus the aforementioned chainsaw slide, and the game expects you to be moving always. I feel the difficulty curve is generally pretty good, though the Episode 2 bosses was where it starts expecting a lot more from the player. Some parts can be a huge endurance round where you'll be on the edge of life and death at all times. The final few levels especially throw everything and the kitchen sink at you.
Levels can go on for a long time with hundreds of enemies in each one. Sometimes it feels like a joke the devs are in on: "Hey this seems like a lot of enemies... add more." You can even get a cheat to multiply enemy spawns by threefold, which is honestly hilarious by that point. Oh right, each level has three chips and three cassette tapes that unlock cheats and hidden levels respectfully. Because of your insane mobility and the length of these stages, a lot of these collectables can be borderline too well hidden. It wasn't uncommon to spend close to 30 minutes in a single level, only to miss half of the collectables despite my best efforts. Thankfully they aren't required by any means, they're just for fun and extra content. And you don't need to find them on one clean run, the game saves every collectible you pick-up.
The story here, while nothing new or thought-provoking, knows what it is the whole way through. It knows when to ramp up its silliness to the logical extreme, but also knows when to throw a curve ball that forces the heroes in a difficult situation. Its got style and attitude a plenty, maybe a little juvenile with the amount middle fingers and f-bombs thrown left and right, but it never feels artificial nor boring. And this probably has one of the only walk-and-talk sections in any game you can skip, holy shit why is this not standard? The amount humor thrown in this game is the cherry on top. I like the enemy descriptions in the bestiary that were written by a guy who clearly has a grudge against several enemies. I like some of the silly graffiti on the way in most levels of this cyberpunk dystopian that can feel like it was drawn by bored teenagers. And I especially love how bizarre and ludicrous these weapons can get. The dual uzis you get early on allows you to turn one of the uzis into a more accurate two-handed rifle, but instead of putting the other gun away Johnny will just toss the extra onto the floor where it becomes a game object with physics. Little details like that makes the personality of a game shine.
It feels this game has been going under the radar, and that's a crying shame since this game goes really freakin hard. Far harder then it has any right to. The set pieces are some of the best of any in its genre, and the gameplay is top tier in its execution and systems. Even if it can get frustrating with some endgame sections, I'm willing to look past it because of how much more this game gets right.
And you can gib enemies with your chainsaw leg.
I rest my case.
AlphaOne2
7 months ago