Turrican Flashback might sound weird to some people in the West but I can assure you that it is a legendary video game series to our friends across the ocean. Factor 5 cut its teeth with this series that helped alter the gaming landscape by combing combat and exploration the likes of which we’d never seen before in a game. It was an assault of ass-blasting music, insane difficulty, and mega weapons. This is even more impressive when you realize that it originally released on the lowly Commodore 64 (a title weirdly not included in this collection) before exploding on the Amiga.
Turrican II was the series at its peak popularity, so much so that a simple kid in Southern California knew about the game even without the existence of the internet and a time when nobody knew what an Amiga even was. I can’t explain enough how much of a big deal Turrican was at the time. It was so big that it was eventually brought to the West on both the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. And while some Euro games made the trip out West, the Turrican releases on 16-bit platforms were wholly unique games to the SNES and Genesis and not both a cheap port of the Amiga games.
Many liken the Turrican series to Contra and its run-and-gun gameplay, which is fair on a surface level, but ramps it up to eleven by ditching the linearity that nearly every video game was saddled with at the time. Instead of running right and shooting everything coming at you, Turrican featured an open-ended focus that placed an importance on exploring the large stages just as much as on shooting the baddies on the screen with cool weapons. This isn’t a titles you simply sit down and knock out in a couple a minutes, it’s one that requires an investment from the player, especially as you are also fighting the timer the whole way through.
Turrican rewarded you for exploring its large levels and taking notes. I’m not kidding when I say that the stages were large and detailed to the point that to fully enjoy the game might require to you draw out a physical map, or at the very least remember certain landmarks in each stage. Very few games keep surprising you decades after releasing, but the Turrican series does just that as I found so much new stuff and areas now that I much more enjoy exploring video games than simply running and gunning like I did as a kid.
That said, the SNES and Sega releases of Turrican were smart about the gameplay as Western gamers weren’t used to the open-ended nature of the Euro shooter/platformer. This means that those two games are much more linear and unique to themselves, even ditching the grappling hook in the SNES release. And while different, they are great entry points into the series, giving the player just enough to make them want to try out the other games in the series. That’s why on the surface Turrican Flashback is the perfect sort of compilation as each game included feels like Turrican while each does something unique to whatever platform it released on.
But the biggest and best part of Turrican Flashback is the rewind function that, well, makes the games winnable. Unless you were/are some sort of gaming god, odds are you never beat any of the Turrican games. That’s not a bad thing as it’s the kind of series you might never beat and still enjoy, but the rewind feature allowed me to see parts of the older games that I had never seen/experienced before. Add in the fact that all the cheat codes are fully functional and you have this little pot of gold in terms of enjoyment. And for that perfect old-school feel you get some neat visuals filters and sound options to change things up as you play.
Aside from that there is vert little. Some people are going to be disappointed with the lack of extras in terms of new modes, but where it really shows is in the lack of developer extras. There are no galleries, no design bibles, or audio extras for the great scores. I would have loved both a speed run mode where you beat the clock as well as a no timer mode so you can just explore. But most notable in terms of exclusion is that there are a couple of games in the series that aren’t included here for whatever reason. That said, there is still more than enough gameplay content here to keep you entertained for a long time but it does comes away as being pretty bare-boned in terms of a collection.
I’d still recommend Turrican Flashback as each game in the series feels great and chances are Western players have only ever experienced a single titles in the series. But while I recommend the game there are some issues that need to be worked out on the Nintendo Switch release. For whatever reason, I’ve had the game crash out on both the SNES and Sega releases on multiple occasions. This also happened after release and after the first patch was pushed out, meaning this is a deeper issue and not something racked up to pre-release review issues.
This is probably something that can be fixed and it might not be something every player experiences, but multiple crashes on different games tells me it isn’t some random fluke only I will experience. That said, Turrican Flashback is a decent collection and probably the best way to finally experience Turrican I & II on the go, even if the $30 price tag might be a tad bit high for only four games and no glitz.
Pros:
+ Amazing Soundtrack
+ 4 Unique Classics In One
Cons:
– Lack Of Extras
– Crashing Issues
– Price Point
Final Score
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