Hurrican Review 
Turrican is one of those games which has appeared in so many different guises that I genuinely don't know what should be contained in a proper remake of it. I suppose you could just remake the Commodore 64 version, but if there are better ones out there then why not remake them instead? Perhaps incorporate elements from the Megadrive or SNES versions while you're at it.
And that's what I think Hurrican by Poke53280 does. It's certainly not based on any one version of Turrican, plus it appears to incorporate many new enemies. I'm perfectly willing to be wrong about this as I'm not an expert on the series, but a cursory check of the excellent Turrican Seta fanpages makes me fairly confident.
So Hurrican is Turrican Megamix essentially, and I can't think of a more fitting tribute to the series. I don't think I've seen many remakes which have lavished such care and attention on updating an old game while remaining true to its roots.
I would have a lot more action in these screenshots but I had to reach over and press PRNTSCRN so they're a bit empty of bullets.
Although the basic exploratory gameplay shines through - and has even been bettered thanks to signs pointing the way to the exit - there is a problem, in that more doesn't necessarily mean better. Hurrican boasts no less than 5 different fire buttons, one for a switchable main weapon, one for a rotatable beam weapon and three more for various limited resource weapons. And some of these can even be combined with other buttons to activate secondary functions. It's just too much, they should have just picked a single one of the extra weapons and got rid of the others for the sake of simplicity.
Of course, this wouldn't have been such an issue had you been able to use a gamepad to control the game properly, but the gamepad functionality is frankly broken. I found I was only able to use a two-thirds of the buttons on my Xbox 360 pad to do anything, as it ignores the second analogue stick and triggers on the back of the pad, which would have been perfect for some functions. But, that's the kind of problem which is eminently solvable through a patch, so I'm sure it'll get fixed.
This boss encounter is Great...
...But the rest of level 2 is a sod - full of really cheap traps which will claim many of your lives. Old school for the win!
Other than those issues I had a blast playing Hurrican. There's a few gaming no-noes like leaps of faith and spike pits which remain off screen simply because of the default position of the camera, but overall it's got really solid gameplay. It's not going to make you think "ooh, that's ingenious" at any point, but it does remain extremely satisfying throughout.
Graphically the game has gone the route of pre-rendered sprites for everything. While this means that the graphics all hang together pretty well with the exception of a bit of pixelly masking, it also means that most of the enemies are of the robotic persuation and there's only a few organic foes apparent within the levels that I've reached. That's a real pity because the game boasts an excellent array of particle effects and it would have been nice to see some more gooey ones in evidence.
I hope that bomb wants to hug me...
The sound in the game is good, too, with a clear sound effect to warn you when you're taking damage and everything else sounding just like it should. The music also fits the game well, with several tracks standing on their own quite well.
If you enjoy platformer shooters then I can't recommend Hurrican enough. It's a bit meat and potatoes due to staying close to the source material, but - compared to other faithful remakes of old platform shooters - this is at the high end of meat and potatoes. Like a nice steak and cheesy mustard mash.
Absolutely worth the 40Mb download.
Graham
