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
Technically the game here is impressive. The C64 conversion looks great and offers some nice visuals comparable to a 16bit arcade game, but limited of course to its 8bit hardware. The main sprite had just a minor rework, and the overall graphics looks much of the original but limited to Commodore's color palette. Scrolling is smooth and sprites are nicely animated, moving fast in all eight directions. Also the backgrounds are partly animated, and resemble good enough the original visuals (i.e. the animated waterfalls). Note that the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum had to make sacrifices to make it possible here, resulting to a less impressive game in terms of graphics, gameplay and sound.
Sound and music are similarly effective. Although it lacks the awesome music compositions by Chris Huelsbeck, the introductory tune is a great example of the SID sound generator capabilities. During gameplay music is playing only in the spaceship levels, while the rest of the levels have sound effects only. These are well matched to the game's atmosphere, and there is a spot effect for every single bullet and explosion.