Label: Rainbow Arts
Price: £8.95
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins
What on Earth is a Turrican? Is it some sort of brightly-coloured South American bird? Is it a steel enclosure for turries? Is it some martial art practiced in Newcastle? It's none of these. A Turrican, Frank, is in fact a fearless hulking great armoured adventurer chappie who fights his way through the five levels of magical mayhem in search of the evil three-headed Morgul. So now you know.
The most remarkable thing about Turrican is the play area. It's an absolutely massive scrolling landscape. Next come the graphics, which are colourful and varied (but pretty damned blocky). The premise of the game itself is simple. There's an awful lot of aliens out there, and you've got to kill them all, with an ever-escalating armoury or weapons.
As you run and leap around the five kingdoms your ultimate aim is to find the nightmare-maker Morgul and give him the chop; on the way you have to blow away a selection of vampire bats, robotic monsters and other ghoulies. You have a standard zappy-gun to do this, but you can also pick up tokens which give you other weapons such as lightning-whip which you can wave around madly, a multi-shot weapon and a laser gun.
There are also smart bombs which clear a whole screen with a field of flame, force shields which protect you from harm for a limited period, grenades, and diamonds which are, er, pretty (and which add up to give you extra lives). Laying mines can help you to blast your way into fresh areas, but some walls can simply be destroyed with your gun, which makes you wonder why they're there.
If it all becomes too much, you can turn yourself it to an invincible gyroscope by pressing DOWN and ENTER. Once in gyroscope form, you're impervious to any form of attack, and wipe out everything you touch. You can't travel upwards as the gyroscope, however. Pressing Q (up) returns you to humanoid appearance.
First appearances can be deceptive. On face value, Turrican looks slightly unpolished and workmanlike, but its sheer map size and variety of aliens make it rather special.
Label: Kixx
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99
Reviewer: Steve Keen
Where did they get this name from? Turrican is a major shoot 'em up blast, first seen last year and it's title has been confusing me ever since.
A mythical science-fiction based, horizontally scrolling shoot 'em' up, Turrican involves clearing five worlds of evil uglies using a space suite man with a futuristic pop gun. Sounds difficult? It is! However to help you along there are plenty of power-ups and special weapons varying from the mildly devastating to the totally annihilating. This includes a a laser whip (OOhh!), a rapid fire laser gun (AAgghh!), smart bombs (KaoBoom!) and mines (and mine's a pint - of milk eh kids?)
The main sprite moves around the battlezone with great speed and agility and by transforming into a gyroscope or by using force shield power up becomes invincible.
Although the graphics and sound aren't stunning, indeed for such a popular game they could have been better, the sheer scale of the action and the speed at which enemies attack, makes this a worthwhile budget buy.
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