Turbo Overkill

Absurd, unrelenting and endlessly creative, Turbo Overkill is a masterfully composed symphony of violence.

Now it's left early access, Turbo Overkill is a retro-styled FPS where copious mutants make excellent grind rails for your chainsaw leg, but its momentum gets bruised by its longer run-time.

Turbo Overkill loses itself in its constant push for escalation. It’s often not as clever as it thinks it is, and there’s a real sense of quantity over quality. Packing in more mechanics is certainly a type of progress, but a better focus on fewer concepts probably would have elevated the game as a whole. As it is, it’s still a perfectly fun time, and I’d be completely willing to revisit it in a sequel, but it just doesn’t quite climb to the lofty top of the retro-inspired scrap heap.

Turbo Overkill is one of our favourite boomer shooters, modern or otherwise. Johnny Turbo's chainsaw-sliding, wall-running and grappling combine with slo-mo silliness to provide a whole lot of punchy murderizing that's a joy to get down and dirty with. Paradise is a glorious playground, a combat puzzle box packed full of amazingly explodey mutants, and the whole thing looks and sounds fantastic in both docked and handheld. If it wasn't for that 30fps cap and a current lack of gyro support, we'd call this the best boomer shooter on Switch so fast you'd think we'd just activated our very own version of Turbo Time.

Taking inspiration from shooters of the 90's, Turbo Overkill is as much a delight as they were back in the day. A few modern tweaks don't deviate from formula, making it a welcome inclusion to anyone old enough to know what rocket-jumping is. It isn't bloated either, with a decent campaign and some additional modes to get stuck into as the challenge escalates.

Turbo Overkill is a game for anyone who loves facing near-death situations in games and isn’t afraid to dive right in headfirst. It only takes a few hits to die, so you need to keep moving constantly as you battle hundreds of enemies. Get into the retro spirit, reminisce about gaming experiences from the turn of the millennium, and enjoy the solid action that Turbo Overkill has to offer. The intricate design, long playtime, and cyberpunk setting will remind you of the days of Deus Ex, The Matrix, or Ghost in the Shell. While Turbo Overkill isn’t primarily designed for consoles, if you can handle controlling Johnny Turbo with a gamepad, you can handle any other game.

Overall, Turbo Overkill is a decent first-person shooter that oozes personality. It might be a little rough around the edges, but the action, music, and creepy AI-based story is enough to whet the appetite of genre fans.

Turbo Overkill is a Doom-like shooter that also mixes other games, generating a unique and adrenaline-filled formula, with an incredible impact on a dystopian future made of neon and violence.

Turbo Overkill is a frenetic and unscrupulous FPS, at times exhilarating in pace and variety. It is precisely its excesses, however, that may make it less appealing than expected to more purist shooter fans. Indeed, the relentless pursuit of exaggerated escalation of violence ends up leaving some aspects by the wayside that make the title less compact than hoped for, especially in the context of the home console adaptation. And so, the control system ends up showing the side of some excessive nervousness and some features are inexplicably absent. Regardless, it remains a must try for fans of the genre and a commendable debut for Trigger Happy Interactive.

Turbo Overkill is a high adrenaline throwback to first person shooter origins. It sets itself apart from others though in its cyberpunk, vibrant atmosphere and curious weapon and body modification systems. If you haven’t picked it up already on PC, maybe the console port is more your style. Turbo Overkill definitely earns itself the Thumb Culture Gold Award.