Turrican Review by: Totts - 10/10
The Forever Man TurricanWhen Turrican (1990) appeared in the shops and I played it for the first time on my Commodore 64, which was the world for me! This game was so good that I would play for days and weeks on end and still wanted to play more. Turrican tickled absolutely everything out from the small machine. The perfect technology surpassed only by the great playability. This Turrican playing ‘session’ continued years later when I had an Amiga, again. It was the music of Chris Hulsbeck, which could capture one for hours before the screen next to the appropriate better picture. What Trenz Manfred, created with this game developers by Turrican, can be described only as a masterpiece. Turrican is definitely one of the games most played by me.
The game itself is filled with the latest technology from a brave warrior, the fully equipped Turrican, who is alone in the fight against the evil and anxiety spreading Morgul absorbing empire. Through five huge worlds, each consisting of two or three individual levels, you must wade through jumping and shooting his way up to Morguls secret hiding place. What makes this so special is the way that, as it had not been common, prior to the appearance of this title in almost all games of this type, is that you must find him by searching through some extremely large and labyrinthine sites. The resulting constant search for hidden extras such as weapons, additional life and crystals, which total a number of three hundred for a further continue is especially fun.
The individual scenes, whether above or below ground, industrial or natural, are very successfully drawn and contribute significantly to the dense atmosphere. My favorite enemy is still the great creeping alien with three faces in the middle of the fourth world. To have a chance at all these monstrous opponents, our hero must make sure that he has been embellished with enough weapons to see him through the battle. The standard floor area scanning multiple shot and a strong laser beam are essential. In addition, he can obtain a flexible, in all directions, energy beam. As if this weren't enough, our hero gets equipped with laser walls, grenades and mines. So you can vigorously annihilate evil Morgul and its villains making sure you are well equipped. Another special feature of the Turrican battle is the ability to transform into a spherical and prickly sphere. Although this may now be strongly reminiscent of Metroid, Turrican is no imitator. The game is extremely action-focused and requires no too much mental work as Metroid. Two jet-pack levels also ‘loosen’ its connection to just pure platform action.
Turrican is a game that everyone should know. It's fun on all systems, although the 16-bit versions for the Amiga and Atari ST are in my opinion still the best, aside from the dramatic explosion this game had onto the scene on the Commodore 64. The game for the mega drive (Genesis) and the American PC engine (TurboGrafx) was implemented as great games for the cartridge genre. Musically, these two versions are not as good as the others and have a few shortcomings in terms of the orignal template. The Mega Drive version is much more preferable to the TurboGrafx implementation because the latter is shorter by a whole world!
Graphics
9 Sound
9 Addictive
10 Depth
9 Story
8 Difficulty
8
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