I bounced off this pretty hard when I originally tried it years ago. I've never really been into Diablo style ARPGs and this was the first game of that type that I spent a good chunk of time with.

During that first go with it, I was expecting "ARPG" to mean something like Dark Souls, where player mastery can make up for lacking gear or character builds, and I was let down by the comparative mindlessness.

This time around I found a lot more to like, especially when I realized the format of the game is best played from the perspective that the character you are building is less a representation of yourself and more like an automated monster slaying engine that requires very little input. Approaching it that way, I enjoyed it a lot more, treating it like a Cookie Clicker sort of low input dopamine generator.

Still, there just wasn't enough engagement to keep me invested past Act 1 and I probably won't be picking it back up again, but I am glad to finally get some more insight on the appeal of this sort of game.

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.

It’s impossible to quantify the influence Super Metroid has had on video games even to this day so it’s no surprise that Ubisoft, home of the AAAA sandbox simulator, has decided to take cues from the classic explore-em-up for their (relatively) small scale shot at revitalizing their flailing Prince of Persia series. What IS surprising though, is how much passion and polish has been injected into this project, streamlining the tried and true formula while adding some fresh flourishes to hearken back to that legendary SNES title but still maintain its modernity.

Apart from an opening text crawl, Super Metroid famously kept all of its storytelling diegetic, though even its contemporary predecessor, Metroid Dread, felt the need to sprinkle in cutscenes and dialogue throughout the campaign. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown takes this in the completely opposite direction, laying out elaborate lore and a sizable cast of colorful characters to set itself apart from other Exploration/Search Action genre fare. It does all this with a distinct shounen anime flair, from its Demon Slayer style team of super badass warriors, to its totally-not-ki based power system, all the way down to the stylized impact frames in the fight scenes. There’s a vivacity to the storytelling, a generally simple premise (with a few wrinkles as well as plentiful background story if you care to dig) that keeps the momentum up even if the player decides to take their time and closely inspect every inch of the expansive maze that is Mount Qaf, the game’s primary setting. Look, if you’re going to roughly sketch a character by only giving them a cool design and a few lines of dialogue, it really helps to also give them nifty anime powers, especially if those powers make for memorable boss fights.

Those boss fights end up being some major highlights for the game. They’re bolstered by the basic, yet effective story, the great cutscene direction and voice delivery, and being backed by strong music tracks. Of course those details would all fall flat if they just weren’t fun to fight, and this is where I think The Lost Crown really sets itself apart, its deceptively simple combat mechanics. To me, the parry is at the heart of combat, reliably providing defensive and offensive opportunities without much variation (besides timing obviously) throughout the game. But the ever evolving melee combat deserves a lot of praise as well, starting with basic combo strings early on with various options unfolding with every ability unlock. Sure an air dash will allow you to explore new rooms and move around more efficiently, but it also allows you to rack up further air combos or approach enemies from new angles.

Enemies that respond fluidly and legitimately feel dangerous rather than just speed bumps while exploring are another understated pillar of the combat design. For example, some enemies will automatically backdash after receiving a 2-hit string, but knowing this means you can hard counter by dashing after them and continuing the onslaught after you’ve clipped their escape. All these elements coalesce to form a kind of fighting game sensibility to encounters, a tempo of acting and reacting that can be graceful and punishing in equal measure. The fact that there are unlockable super moves with their own meter also adds to this fighting game flavor. Wiping out fodder enemies with a banked super or punctuating boss fights with one just as you earn the meter feels like properly granted player expression, a hallmark of good design.

So The Lost Crown nails the elements that distinguish itself from other Metroid-likes, its story and its combat, but how well does it execute on the foundations of the formula, its exploration and its environments? Mount Qaf is a place where time no longer flows linearly, something familiar to anyone who dabbled with the 6th gen PoP games, but this concept is used to great effect in places where time has ceased to move at all, creating striking backdrops like enormous statues frozen in mid-collapse, or battles on a raging sea snapshotted in a chaotic diorama. Sure, there are also standard locales like the sewers and a pretty standard forest, but every area has a layer of detail that makes it worthwhile to stand and appreciate them from time to time.

Traversal is given a lot of attention as well, both for the player character and the environments writ large. Besides the aforementioned combat considerations there’s a lot of fun moment-to-moment navigation and platforming challenges sprinkled throughout the entire world map including fun one-off collectibles that hang in the air and force you to navigate an obstacle course before planting your feet and claiming the coin, not unlike Celeste’s strawberries. If there’s any mark of quality for platforming excellence, you can’t go wrong being compared to Celeste. In fact there were more than a few sections that really push on the player to pick out their routes and execute without pause, hearkening back to Celeste’s platforming-as- mountain-climbing simulacra.

The highest compliment I can give TLC is that it does not by any means overstay its welcome. I backtracked quite a lot for extra items and got lost more than a few times (though there is a mode that highlights your next destination on the map, I just went without it) and I hit the final boss stretch at around 16 hours. Afterwards I dove back in for 100% completion and polished everything off with only an hour or two of extra effort. It’s also worth noting I played on the Hard Mode equivalent, dying more than a few times early on. I praise games a lot for their compactness, and TLC is not exactly brief, nor is it All Killer No Filler, but it IS about a 90:10 split in its Killer:Filler ratio.

More than anything the experience of playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is exceptionally smooth. There’s no major flaws that stick out, and it's enjoyable to play in sessions lasting anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours, making for a joyous medium sized package of exploration and combat with a pretty good story propping the whole thing up.