Turbo Overkill
Playtime: 17.4 Hours
Finished 27 July 2026.Played on "Serve Me Pain", the second highest difficulty in the game. It kind of feels like a middle ground between a UV/NM difficulty level in the Doom games, with a few key differences: enemies run faster, projectile speeds have a 1.45x multiplier, and there is a 3x multiplier for all damage received, so you die very quickly. There's apparently a couple other minor changes (for example, you can't buy ammo in shops and can only rely on pickups instead) but I didn't really notice the effects of anything else.
I originally started playing through the game in February 2026, but ended up putting the game on hold because of one of the boss fights in Episode 2. I only ended up returning to this much later and finished the rest of Episode 2 & 3 in about a week afterwards.
This is undoubtedly the fastest of the modern boomer shooters that I've played so far - pretty much every characteristic of the game is amped up to the next level, and generally in a good way. The gameplay is basically running in fast-motion, which is actually a very accurate assessment given that the SMP difficulty boosts their movement speed, reaction speed, and projectile speed by a decent factor. The player gets plenty of toys to match, with a massive list of movement options: Leg chainsaw boost, omnidirectional dash, double jump, shotgun & rocket jump boosts, grappling, wallrunning, and upgradeable portals in many arenas with a specific upgrade.
Unsurprisingly, the player mechanics in this game are absolutely phenomenal. All of the movement options are individually tuned quite well; the chainsaw dash feels powerful and boosts your speed by quite a large amount, recoil jumping is a very useful mechanic, and the addition of both an instant dash & double jumping gives you tons of options to stay off the ground, away from danger. Furthermore, you have tons of air control by default - so jumping never limits your trajectory, which is great when trying to dodge thousands of little projectiles all over the place. Weapons are similarly great in terms of overall feel; they're very well balanced, each maintaining some degree of useful primary or secondary functionality through the entire game. Aiming feels very snappy, and visual and sound effects are powerful (though not the boomiest or loudest, which I think is a good thing). There's quite a lot of overlap between some weapon categories though, with a typical conflict between the shotgun & SSG, but also another between the automatic weapons - the SMG/AR, Minigun, and Plasma gun are fairly similar variants of a simple spam weapon. There's also a time dilation mechanic and lock-on missiles that you can use - they just felt like "more mechanics" that you could use, but I barely ever did so don't have too much to say. One minor issue with the weapons is that the hitboxes feel very inconsistent. I've gotten headshots from wildly inaccurate spam, but other times notice that a wall's hitbox extends a full meter beyond the actual wall. I assume that much of this is to relax aim requirements to compensate for the game's pace, but it doesn't feel quite right.
To make the experience adapt more closely to your playstyle, this game has a system of upgrades & augments. Throughout the course of the game, shops will gradually unlock weapon upgrades, improving your weapon and unlocking or expanding an alt-fire functionality for each. These tend to be quite fun - the Rocket Launcher enables remote detonation, the Shotgun gets a chargeable high-damage stun blast, etc. There are also augments - which you can either find in chest throughout the levels or buy from shops. These boost various basic gameplay characteristics, with various options improving your movement (triple jump, wall jump, dash invincibility, etc.), sub-weaponry (micro missile damage & recharge, chainsaw recovery, damage, speed), or other general upgrades (medkit overheal, magnetic money & item pickup, etc.). Choices are extensive and effects are substantial, so it does really feel like you're customizing the flow of your experience. Finally, you also get various bonus micro-chips from finding all of a certain secret type in a level, which act very similarly to Halo skulls and add various (positive or challenge) effects to a level at large.
Speaking of gameplay, the overall gameplay flow is a pretty varied mix of enemy-filled corridors & pathways connecting some larger arenas, which get more and more prevalent towards the later parts of the game. Combat is extremely hectic; most enemies are projectile-based rather than hitscan-based, so there's a very heavy emphasis on dodging and avoiding attacks while kiting out large groups, prioritizing high-value targets as you grind down the enemy numbers. It has a similar philosophy to other games like Serious Sam but ultimately goes about it in a very different way. Where Sam was all about leveraging tight movement and strict target prioritization to "dance" with massive waves of enemies, I feel like the effective overdose of available movement & dodging mechanics in Turbo Overkill promote a playstyle of "spamming" all your resources instead to avoid being in the same zip code as anything you're not rushing at with your chainsaws. While the tech can be used very liberally for puzzles, secrets, or just transitional movement segments between fights, my success with simply spamming all of my jumps, dashes, boosts, grapples, etc. just to stay in the air definitely makes the game feel less "decisive" or "tactical" in favor of just pure mania.
I've got quite a few gripes with the game as well. The biggest one is the enemy balance; outside of the few obvious trash mobs, so many of the enemy types are "Heavy" or above that everything ends up feeling super tanky. You can barely kill anything other than the wimpiest goon with a direct hit from a rocket, with even some of the lightest non-trash enemies (like the sawblade dudes) regularly taking multiple SSGs or rockets to kill. This ties into the hectic combat flow, as instead of judicious target focus, you kind of just have to spam all your weapons at everything until they're all dead in a fight; I didn't really have much of a enemy->counter mindset (like Kleer -> Sidestep -> SSG, or Werebull -> Double rocket or Rocket+SSG). As long as you can dodge for long enough, you can essentially just outlive the opposition.
On that note, I also want to point out that resources in this game feel somewhat meaningless to me as well. On Serve Me Pain, the massive damage multiplier basically makes your health somewhat meaningless; trash mobs still tickle you, anything else instakills you from 200/200. The only real purpose of building up your health stat is to get enough for a health gate of 4hp/0ar. Lots of heavier enemies also tend to have weaponry that can bypass this as well - swarms of missiles and some explosives seem to just kill you instantaneously, so combat often feels very volatile - in tougher encounters, it almost feels like I'm just rolling for good luck on a missile dodge or some enemy behavior. Similarly, ammo is also quite meaningless - outside of a few specific circumstances, it's extremely uncommon to run out of any kind of ammo so I'm really not sure why this is a factor that changes based on difficulty (ammo is sold at shops on lower difficulty settings).
My last gripes have to do with various elements of the level & encounter design. I'm firstly not a big fan of the vehicle segments, since they feel quite out of place even if they are kind of easy; controls feel kind of awkward and it's a very different feel to the fast-paced gameplay of the rest of the game. Encounter & combat arena design within levels is generally OK - I'd consider it mediocre, not bad but not unacceptable overall. There are a few standout examples of horrible design, but only a small handful. Unfortunately, many examples within that small handful include most of the boss fights, which suck ass in general. Given that the game is build so heavily around the chainsaw leg and movement, most of the game's combat requires lots of trash mobs for regular recovery. Boss fights have an awful mix of infinite trash mob spawns in addition to really annoying, unnecessary tanky bosses. Some of them even spawn entire waves of heavy enemies - Ripper's boss fight was such bullshit with this that I paused this game for 6 months before I came back for a second wind. Lots of lategame fights have far too many phases; Maw has like 5 boss fights, each with ~5 phases - and some with full enemy waves between phases making the actual "phase count" closer to 10-15. These are drawn out far beyond any reasonable manner, and the game does nothing to justify it. One extra little bullshit factor in the final boss is a 30-second survival countdown after you do the final scripted "crawl", which comes out of left field and would completely reset the long fight if you die to the 200 things that spawn. It's thankfully easy to cheese by sitting in a faraway corner, but this kind of design is close to unacceptable.
My overall takeaway of this game is that I enjoyed plenty of moments of the game, yet I generally think it confuses "faster" with "better", and "more" with "deeper", or at least promotes this illusion among its playerbase who relentlessly praise all of the functional features packed into the design. I think I've already gone into quite a bit of detail above, but I'll try to break it down more directly here. With all of the different movement tech, the gameplay promotes spamming that tech, rather than focusing on positioning and utilization of limited resources. When enemies are too tanky, there is a de-emphasis on priotizing significant targets quickly - as the design must accomodate the fact that truly dangerous enemies cannot be reliably eliminated immediately. The presence of all these other gameplay mechanics dilutes the focus of the game further; I see it as an indecisive and inexperienced developer throwing everything at the wall because they can. My experience playing this game was kind of a lesson to me about what happens if you offer TOO MUCH choice in a game; with a few more design constraints, I think there would have been a much tighter focus on the actual gameplay loop and level design. Obviously, that's just my opinion and I can't really say how anybody else might feel about it! But for all my criticism, I still think this is a solid game, and it feels VERY complete with all kinds of different modes, level editing, plenty of reasons to go back for replays, interesting challenges, etc.
