Three years before Turrican, composer Chris Hülsbeck and developer Manfred Trenz worked on The Great Giana Sisters, a game whose debt to Super Mario Bros. was implicit in its title and only got more obvious from there. Forced withdrawal from sale obvious. A few Manfred Trenz games later, had he learned his lesson and stayed away from Nintendo properties? Well, Turrican is a sci-fi shooter-platformer that sees you explore a vast, desolate alien world, playing as a person enclosed within a metal suit, equipped with an array of weaponry and the ability to transform into a small, round, extra-mobile form. There’s no helmet-removing reveal of Turrican as a woman, but one wouldn’t completely come as a shock.
As obvious as Turrican‘s similarities to Metroid are, though, it is a very different case to The Great Giana Sisters. Narrative aside, Giana‘s innovations were treated as secondary to ensuring resemblance to Super Mario Bros., purposefully remaining in its shadow (arguably, all the better placed to subvert it). Turrican takes some specific ideas from Metroid and uses them as one element in something new. It’s like sampling a song as opposed to recording an exacting cover version of it.
Even in its C64-stretching form, never mind the Amiga one, Turrican feels less close to Metroid than to Super Metroid, still four years away. Turrican‘s sprawling opening levels out on the planet’s surface capture the same intense feeling of desolation, and it controls with a smoothness and freedom of movement that the urge to explore naturally extends from. There’s a particularly stunning moment in the opening level when the sky gradually darkens from light blue to black as you descend into the depths of its caves. When its huge levels do get more enclosed, it feels deliberate rather than as a result of design constraints. But the other thing Turrican is closer to than Metroid is a powered-up version of the game Metroid briefly pretended to be in Samus’s first foray to the right. It feels like Trenz learned a bunch of lessons and then discarded half of them because they didn’t allow for quick enough thrills. Maybe the sampling is to make a point of not being the same.
To go to another musical comparison (and an apt one given the game’s title screen Manowar reference), Turrican is a big heavy metal ballad of a game. It uses space and restraint, but also big show-off power. It has caches of extra lives in great globs. Its power-ups come in massive blocks that spit out big groups of enhancements when destroyed, and their potent effects owe a lot to the dramatic escalation of shoot-em-ups even before the pair of levels when Turrican literally turns into one. You get a few chances a level to wipe out everything on the screen with a tap of your keyboard. The boss designs are all impressive in their scale and mechanical monstrosity. Then there’s the lightning gun, where you stand still and fire a line of electrical rage when can be spun around 360 degrees to destroy creatures and walls foolish enough to come near. You don’t need a power-up to get that, to be clear, though they can enhance its length.
The lightning gun is the clearest moment for the message that power is fun, which is never going to be a problem-free one, but Turrican does use it as a means to a different end. We’ve already covered the cliché of the cute-looking game which turns out to be viciously difficult, and Turrican is, at least for a while, the opposite in matching a hardened aesthetic with generosity to the player. As well as the overpowered character being spectacular, the powers are really useful tools in exploration. And despite being arranged in Point A to Point B levels, it’s clear you’re missing out if you don’t go exploring, given the rewards in both power-ups and in the rich experience of discovery. Other joys match the joys of blowing things up, in equilibrium just like the thrill of the new and the thrill of the familiar.
[This piece originally appeared on AAA]