October 19th, 2008 by Craig (email author)

Description

“Turrican fought an epic battle against Morgul and won a stunning victory against great odds. Once again he embarks on a rescue mission. Five worlds and twelve levels await him in his Final Fight against the remnants of Morgul’s creation. The classic run-and-gun shooter saga continues with Turrican II: The Final Fight, a game featuring state-of-the-art visuals, five worlds packed with hidden secrets and treasures, and seven mega-weapons including a powerful flamethrower.” [box art]

Revisited

Widely considered to be one of the better platform shoot-em-ups on the Amiga, Turrican II was the second game in the Turrican Trilogy and was followed up a couple of years later with a conversion of Mega Turrican from the Sega Mega Drive.

For some reason, I never got around to playing the original Turrican. However, I managed to make up for it with the hours I invested in both it’s sequels.

Surprisingly, only the second game of the series was released on the PC. And I have to say that after playing it again I’m a bit confused as to why they didn’t convert the third one as well. The PC conversion is a fantastic piece of work which retains the same playability and feel as the Amiga version while building on the graphics to take advantage of the extra power the PC could provide. The third game in the series was released when the Amiga was starting to lose popularity, so I would have thought a PC version would have been a no-brainer.

The game is a classic console-style plaform shooter. The only aim is to get from one side of the level to the other, jumping and shooting whatever gets in your way. Mixed in with this is the occational scrolling shooter level (a-la R-Type) which breaks up the gameplay. Breaking the game up into two different styles is a bit of a risky strategy which I don’t think works that well. I found myself just wanting the scrolling levels to be over so I could get back to what felt like the proper game.

Playing the game again does make you realise how game design has progressed in the last 15 years. There are some very annoying features of the game which spoil an otherwise fantastic gaming experience. One of these is the bounce gun, which has to be a prime candidate for the ‘most useless weapon in a game ever’ award. I understand the original point of the weapon but it’s implementation is just terrible. As it’s name implies, the weapon fires bullets that splits up and bounce around when they come in contact with an object. However, the majority of the level design does not allow you to take advantage of the weapon’s ability which turns it into an underpowered pee-shooter and results in you trying to avoid it at all cost. You would have thought that if a weapon leaves you shaking your head and sighing every time you pick it, it shouldn’t have added it to the game.

Other strange design decisions include a ridiculously short time limit for the first level, and an annoyingly large number of enemies that can suck down your energy in less than a second. It feels like the developers tried to counter the second point by littering some levels with huge numbers of extra lives. Once you knew what you were doing, it was quite easy to complete the game with more lives than you started with.

However, with all the little design decisions aside, it still remains a nice little shoot-em-up which does give you that ‘one last go’ feeling and is well worth playing again.

Screenshots

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