Turrican 3.

Turrican 3, like many of today’s franchises, felt a little like things were being stretched with the release of a third Turrican game. Turrican himself had undergone a makeover; abandoning his surround laser in place of a fiddly grapple-gun being the most significant change.

The graphical style was very different to the two previous game – better in places, but also with more graphics, colours and parallax effects, many of the backgrounds can be confusing, and you can easily find yourself falling into a chasm or jumping for a platform that isn’t jumpable on. However, what is most annoying is that when you are hit, Turrican bounces backwards, which in many cases causes the loss of life through ending up being knocked into a chasm or other fatality.

As always, the game was bursting with creativity, particularly where the level bosses are concerned, and there’s a lot of variety in the levels. Visually, T3 started to look more akin to the kind of games that were popping up on the Megadrive at the time – it really felt a bit apart from the first two games, but that was kind of a good thing, as you didn’t want another game with too many similarities.

For me personally, it lacks something. it is much harder and occasionally frustrating from a gameplay perspective but above all, I just felt that it lacked the constant appeal of the first two.

AlexS

Science Fiction artist & cover illustrator. Electronic musician and occasional writer.

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