Turrican Flashback Review

With it now being 30 years since the launch of Turrican on the Amiga, ININ Games has decided to celebrate the legacy of the franchise by compiling together some of its finest outings for modern platforms. Turrican Flashback includes Turrican, Turrican 2, Super Turrican and Mega Turrican and also adds new modern day features such as save states and the ability to rewind. The collection might not include every single title to fall underneath the Turrican banner, but these handful of games still represent the best of the series and act as a glimpse back in time to when run and gun platformers dominated the industry.

If you haven't played a Turrican game before then the best way to describe them is that they feature the same explosive run and gun action seen in games like Contra, but there's a greater sense of verticality and freedom within levels. Just like many games of the era, these games are tough as nails, with many enemies constantly firing projectiles at you and charging into your path to whittle down your health bar. Helping you combat this onslaught of foes is a plethora of different power ups that have effects such as increasing your rate of fire and enabling your bullets to ricochet off walls. The games in the collection might span over three different platforms, but they function very similar with the visuals being the biggest change.

Two aspects that really stood out about these games were the soundtrack and the designs of the many boss encounters. The soundtrack from composer Chris Huelsbeck is just so melodic and strangely upbeat, but it fits with the visuals beautifully and there's been more than one occasion where I've had tracks looping around my head. The boss designs proved to be similarly spectacular, as they were a visual spectacle and provided an amped up challenge. Something that was disappointing though was that many tracks and bosses are repeated between both Super Turrican and Mega Turrican. I get that this was perhaps because they were on different platforms and developed in a similar timeframe, but when playing them back to back certain aspects did start to feel a little repetitive.

Personally, I think these games are still really enjoyable to play today even for somebody who didn't grow up within this era of gaming, but there are a few areas that feel a little rough around the edges. In both Turrican and Turrican 2 you continually take damage if you collide with a trap or an enemy, and it can be game over instantly if you don't act fast. This was something jarring to get used to as newer games often give you a period of invincibility to adjust to what is coming ahead. I also found the grappling hook in Mega Turrican to feel really clunky. When using the grappling hook, you need to stand perfectly still to use it, which can be a pain when you're trying to move fast and there're lots of enemies around.

Within the collection there's the new option to create up to six save states within a game. This is certainly a handy feature indeed, but I found my save file to corrupt when playing Mega Turrican, and as a result, I ended up abandoning the game out of sheer frustration. Alongside the save states, there's also a handy rewind function that you can use to reverse your mistakes and this functions just like it does on the Nintendo Online NES and SNES apps. Additionally, there's also cheats that you can input, there's several display options, and there's the option to add different wallpapers to fill out the borders of the screen.

What this collection really is missing though is a real incentive for older fans to jump back in again besides reliving the games on modern hardware. Sure, the save states and rewind function are handy, but there's nothing here that feels like a true celebration of the series. All that is present on the main menu of the game is just a block of text providing a description of each title and it doesn't even include basic expectations like shots of the box art. Something I personally would have loved to have seen is a music library and shots of concept artwork.

Turrican Flashback represents the many highs of the Turrican series and it helps to bring its run and gun action to the modern day with handy features such as save states. The four titles present manage to hold up remarkably well after all this time and I suffered no problems when it came to the emulation. I did, however, think that it was lacking a few additional features such as a music player to make it feel like a true celebration of the series. If you're a fan of retro games and are looking for something in a similar vein to Contra, but with a twist, then I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with Turrican Flashback.