Turrican II

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The year is 3025 and after the first defeat of Mogul the world was very calm. United Planets Freedom Forces were responsible to keep peace. But everything changed after the Avalon 1 (one of their spaceships) has been attacked by an unknown battle-cruiser that came from deep space. While being the only survivor from this fight, Bren McGuire (the new Turrican), needs to take his revenge against those who killed all his partners. So the hero must fight, shoot, walk across traps and confront a variety of alien species of different potential and size. Here's where the challenging story begins. Turrican must jump across many platforms, kill the enemies and gather all tokens available since they grant him with energy, extra bombs and new weapons. His main weapons are a rapid-fire assault rifle, an electro-sweeper plus the ability of becoming a rolling sharp razor (which can kill anything in its path) much like its predecessor. Do not forget to keep an eye on the time limit, as it will be an instant death! Unlike other games of its type, Turrican II contains also three levels of horizontal shooter action in the spirit of R-Type.
The action is fun, mindless and absorbing, and the huge range of enemies and bonus pods keeps it that way for hours. This game is a perfect example of "coin-op like" high quality arcade shooter released on every 8bit/16bit platforms.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
As with the CPC conversion, the programmers got the best out of the Spectrum machine here, resulting mainly in really good graphics considering Spectrum's hardware limitations. The main sprite had just a minor rework, and the overall graphics offer much of the original details, but scrolling is suffering quite a bit. The backgrounds are partly animated too, and resemble good enough the original visuals (i.e. the animated waterfalls).
Sound and music are similarly effective. The ZX version offers the awesome introductory music composition by Chris Huelsbeck (limited of course to its AY Yamaha sound chip), while there no music during gameplay. Sound effects are rather simplistic and there is a spot effect for every single bullet and explosion.

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch all versions of the game.
The ZX Spectrum version is at 52:37.