Turrican II: The Final Fight

The Good
Super Nintendo - Super Mario World (or Donkey Kong Country) Sega Genesis/Megadrive - Sonic the Hedgehog Commodore Amiga & Atari ST - Turrican II

Without a doubt, Turrican II is among the best arcade-platformer games of the 16-bit era. How does it compete on the 8-bit C64?

While the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum had to make sacrifices to make it possible, rendering it somewhat inferior to the previous game, the C64 version... didn't change at first glance. The main sprite had just a minor rework, and the overall graphics looks much of the same. I already detailed the technical achievements of the Turrican franchise in my review of the previous game. The smooth scrolling and high framerate animations are still present, although the graphics feels a little bit more blocky. Once you have seen the Amiga version, you will miss the amount of pixel-art details and beautiful colors (especially the background of the first level), when you look at this version.

It does not have a digi speech and a cool loader screen like the first Turrican, it has a high-resolution image slide-show and text instead that tells the story of the game --with huge gaping plot holes, I have to add. But the game has not much relation with the intro story anyway.

In the aspect of sounds, it is way inferior to the Amiga version, because it lacks the awesome music compositions by Chris Huelsbeck. They are a masterpiece! We only get sound effects instead, they are the same like before, and they are very melodic. The C64 version has a few music on its own, in the intro, at the title screen, on the spaceship levels and perhaps elsewhere too.

The gameplay... well in short, it took the most of that Turrican was, and polished it. Now we can turn into a wheel at any time for example. The levels feel even bigger and twisted. There are so many secret places to explore it is amazing... of course, you have to keep an eye on the time limit. Now instead of a laser, we have kind of a "flame thrower", which is the most convenient weapon. I like to stick with that. But accidentally I always run into the "bounce" weapon power-up, which replaces the fire-waves with balls that bounce off walls and split into smaller projectiles. It is nice in some cases, but not as useful as other weapons. Of course the graphics of the projectiles are simplistic here. I noticed that the boss fights are much harder than in the Amiga version. The boss of the second auto-scrolling spaceship stage differs especially: on the Amiga, it scrolls in from the right in fully assembled form in an open area. While on the C64 you first see it in the foreground passing by (as an enlarged sprite), then you meet with its "arms" in a narrow tunnel, and then... err, I didn't got further XD

The Bad
It is harder to get into - the tricky maziness of the first level can scare away newcomers, like me, when I first tried it. I recommend the previous Turrican first.

Oh yeah, the time limit is back!

I am not so fond of the auto-scrolling spaceship levels in the middle of the game. They are there do drain your lives.

Should I mention the lack of Huelsbeck's soundtracks as a problem?

The Bottom Line
The franchise, despite the subtitle called "the Final Fight", didn't end with Turrian II, nor was intended to. But we all know why it is the final: this was the developers' last original C64 production, a tearful but confident goodbye to the old scene. It is everything that Turrican is, and even bigger. A masterpiece! And you know how they say: "it is the best to quit while you are on the top".