Ask any “boomer shooter” aficionado what their favourite modern examples of the genre are, and Trigger Happy Interactive’s sublime Turbo Overkill will most likely make the top three, alongside Dusk and Ultrakill, if they want to be our actual pals.
Yep, this is a highly-regarded retro-style FPS and, once you’ve spent just a few minutes in the blood-soaked shoes of Johnny Turbo, it’s not very hard to see why. And now, nearly two years after its full PC release, it’s finally on Switch.
Turbo Overkill nails everything it sets out to achieve. It’s slick as all hell in its slo-mo shooting, wall-running and chainsaw-knee-sliding (yes, we said “chainsaw-knee-sliding”). It draws a fantastic line in rain-soaked, cyberpunk broodiness, and it presents a whole menagerie of twisted meat-machine enemies to blast and batter into several billion brightly coloured bits under the gaze of giant neon signs. Relaxing!
Wanna blow a bunch of robot zombies into smithereens with lock-on bullets from your dual-wielded Magnums, go car-surfing across the tops of futuristic flying cars, or teleport inside a bad guy before exploding back out of them? Turbo Overkill has got you covered.
The goal is to kill unrepentantly and without pause, and Trigger Happy has nailed the combat-puzzle nature of what makes a great boomer shooter in its very first attempt. The game is tough-as-nails on harder settings (which can be dialled right down to nice and easy, too, if you’d prefer), and it rewards experimentation with its various abilities, presenting a stiff but totally fair challenge that it’s possible to style your way through unscathed – if you work at it.
In Turbo Overkill, Trigger Happy has gone the extra mile in its narrative setup and world-building, giving us a hard-boiled future bounty hunter who’s hellbent on using his metal-infused form to deliver justice on the streets of Paradise. With a shady rogue AI to take down in the form of Syn, and rival boss bounty hunters to fend off into the bargain, Johnny has a lot on his plate – never mind the psychological traumas of having a big bloody chainsaw for a leg. We get to help him take out the trash across three highly entertaining episodes of five levels apiece. That’s about 20 hours of action if you stop to hoover up all secrets, or 12 at a clip.
When in action, Turbo Overkill is a match for almost anything we’ve played in this most overstuffed of genres. Johnny’s “hero time” ability, lock-on rockets and unlockable alternate fire modes feel punchy and satisfying to play with. Eventually, you get a grappling hook which opens up cool new attack and traversal opportunities, and enemies explode into the most delightful showers of meat and coins as you murderize them. These are the things that make us happy.
Of course, we also need to work that big dirty chainsaw into proceedings for maximum style points, and Johnny can even augment this – and the rest of his limbs – with a slew of buffs and tricks. Augments can provide the aforementioned bullet-time, micro-missiles, grappling hook and triple jumps that help both in killing and in exploring for the colour-coded keys (hooray!) that you’ll need to move forward, as well as for finding the game’s hidden cassette tapes and other collectibles. Top tip: always be checking underwater for goodies!
Without hesitation, then, we’d thoroughly recommend you jump on this one if you have any interest in retro shooters whatsoever. Or at least we would if it weren’t for a few caveats involving this Switch port that need to be highlighted; namely a drop to 30fps and a lack of gyro-aiming support.
Having played Turbo Overkill at 60fps already on another platform, it’s a bit of a shame to have this understandable concession made, but it’s one we can stomach here. The frame rate holds firm for the most part, and it’s only when things get supremely heated, such as when you’re torching your environs with the game’s flamethrower, that you’ll feel your console struggle.
The gyro, however, is something we really hope to see implemented soon. There are plentiful options to refine and adjust axis sensitivities, to invert aim, enable aim-assist and toy with dead zones, but that sweet gyro-movement really does help finesse shots and raise the experience to the next level. It is what it is right now, and a lot of these retro boomer shooter affairs have dropped gyro-aiming updates after their initial release, so fingers crossed it’s something that the devs have in the works.
The good news regarding the controls right now is that, in the interim, the auto-aiming does do a great job of picking up the slack, and even with this turned off we managed to find a rhythm and get back into our old knee-sliding, slo-mo head-popping ways quite easily.
If you can handle the framerate drops and lack of gyro, we really can’t recommend Turbo Overkill enough. It’s slick, addictive, and clever in all the right ways, packed full of fun enemies, excellent level design, and fun voice-acting. And it even has decent arcade and endless horde modes thrown in for good measure.
Conclusion
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.