Turbo Overkill is awesome, but drags for too long

I'm a fan of FPS games. Doom Eternal is one of my top games of all time, so when I found another movement based boomer shooter for cheap, I booted it up. And it was awesome! But, its quality dipped over the duration of the game. For reference, I played on this game's hard difficulty ("Street Cleaner").

#What I Liked Turbo Overkill takes place in the neo-cyberpunk city of Paradise where a rogue AI called Syn has taken over. You play as Johnny Turbo, with the goal of destroying Syn and restoring Paradise before it crumbles and before Syn takes over the whole universe.

Paradise is an awesome atmosphere and those first few levels are awesome. All of the flashy lights, the rain... as you get moving, it becomes really awesome to have all this stuff in the background while you slice apart monsters throughout each of these levels.

It's ridiculous, and it's badass. Your leg is a chainsaw which lets you go slicing through enemies while gore flies through the air. The weapons in this game are all pretty cool iterations of your standard boomer shooter stuff. You've got your pistols, machine guns, plasma gun, rocket launcher, and shotguns, including everyone's favorite Super Shotgun! You've also got weapons like the Ion Blaster. This gun calls a laser from the sky and just blasts whatever the hell is in its way. It's kinda a "get out of jail free card" but it looks cool as hell.

These weapons are all nice to use and mesh very well with the gameplay which is fast paced as you go dashing and double jumping through the air, and then coming to the ground with a chainsaw slide, shredding everything in your path. My best description of its gameplay is "Like Doom Eternal but faster". Doom Eternal introduces all of these dashing mechanics, grappling, etc, as you go throughout the game. Turbo Overkill hands most of them to you in the first level!

Turbo Overkill really nails the satisfying "Blow everything up" feel you want from a boomer shooter, and its atmosphere is pretty goddamn awesome. This is exactly why it had me thinking it would be one of my top FPS games of all time when I was playing through episode 1. Unfortunately, episode 1 is really the best part of the game.

#What I disliked

Despite having a lot of cool stuff in here, it gets bogged down in a few places. For one, the level design of this game isn't anything all too special. Again, there's exceptions, but a lot of it is just hopping into arenas and blowing everything up. This is fine at first of course, but starts getting very repetitive. Some of the levels get so expansive, reaching times of 40 minutes to an hour to complete, with nothing to show for it.

There's several levels built along the lines of "Go to 5 arenas and pull a switch". But all 5 arenas are pretty similar to each other, and contain similar enemies too, meaning that you really feel like you're doing the same thing over again 5 times. It would be one thing if it was just one level, but no, there are MANY different levels in this game that follow this.

While we're at it, I felt the game dragged on a bit too long. A good 30% of this game could have been cut and not too much would have been lost. Episode 1 is new weapons, mechanics, cool weapons, everything. Episode 2 loses some of that novelty but still has new stuff to show. Episode 3, while supposedly the climax. was also the most forgettable to me due to not giving you much new stuff at all, and every level ending up much longer than it really needs to be. The atmosphere also doesn't change up all too much, so I really felt myself getting fatigued my the end there.

Boss fights are also not done very well in this game. They are either way too easy, or are total BS. Even so, most of these bosses don't have a ton of substance, and just rush at you for a while until you deal enough damage, at which point they go invincible and force you to fight a long arena. These fights will go on for 5-10 minutes, and while they're pretty easy, they'll occasionally spawn in a strong enemy that takes you right out and you have to do the whole thing all over, which takes out immersion and gets frustrating in my opinion.

There's a couple bosses that are your generic "Moves really really fast and shoots real fast", and once enough damage is dealt, you get an arena, fight that, then do the same thing like 3 more times. It gets boring.

The absolute worst offender was the boss of one of the final levels. It had 3 forms (THANKFULLY there were checkpoints in between), each one having several "phases" of their own. The first form has 5 health bars that you have to take out, and in between, you have to do a long, tedious arena. This entire fight took me over 20 minutes, and it's a terrible fight because it feels padded and feels like no one stopped to say "Is this fun?"

There's also plenty of bugginess throughout this game. I'll mention I am playing on Linux, with a GOG install running through Wine, so some of this could have simply been faults of that, but certainly not all of it.

When you alt-tab out of the game and tab back it, sometimes it makes it so you can't fully turn around for a little while. No real way to fix it, it just eventually fixes itself.

Sometimes, the chainsaw slide mechanic will get you stuck in walls and in places where you can't move, forcing you to reload your last save. Enemies also occasionally get stuck in walls or disappear, forcing you to reload. I even ran into a few times where an arena would be totally clear, and I would have to restart simply because a door wouldn't open.

The most frustrating bug was on the final boss. Without giving spoilers here, there's a part that involves entering a room, and blowing up a bunch of orbs. This takes place after a pretty difficult, not particularly great boss fight that is pretty bullet-hell and often ends up with you getting one shot killed, by the way. Upon blowing up the final orb, the last phase is initiated. I died in this last phase and reloaded into this room with the orbs, but... none of them respawned, meaning I was softlocked here and had to reload to the beginning of the boss fight, and waste another good 10-15 minutes trying to win without getting killed in one hit. It was FRUSTRATING.

#Overall thoughts

Turbo Overkill has the right ingredients for awesomeness, but drags itself along for too long without much variety at all. If you're into boomer shooters and are fine with a bit of repetition, you'd probably like this. But as the game went on, my opinion was continuously soured as I ran into more bugs and repetitive level design. I honestly might play the first episode again, because that was very fun and awesome, but the rest of the game wasn't anything I'd play again because it runs into design issues of pacing and escalation.

Overall, 6.5-7/10, with most of the points coming from the earlier levels.