Title: The Turrican Collection
System: Evercade
Price: $29.99
Release Date: February 2026
Prelude
It’s been four years since we last looked at the Turrican Series, when it was split across two volumes for PS4. Now on Evercade, Factor 5 has joined as a licensor, and decided to license out the entirety of the Turrican series for a single Evercade cart. No silly volume splits this time around!
Outside of the C64 versions of Turrican 1/2 (which were slightly different games) and NES Super Turrican (Which was a remix made by Manfred Trenz, and is fully owned by him like the C64 vers), everything is here. Turrican 1-Super Turrican 2, all in one set. Quite a neat deal already!
Presentation
Believe it or not, I haven’t covered any of the computer games for Evercade as of now. Sure, I’ve done most of the Arcade carts and some Console stuff, but even owning all the home computer carts I just haven’t gotten around to reviewing any of them. Thus, this marks the first time I get to cover the Amiga emulation on Evercade.
For all the console games (SNES/Genesis), they play as they should and the sound is incredibly accurate. Not a surprise at this point, but considering how incredible the music is for most of these games, I’m pretty pleased that Blaze continues to maintain good emulation quality. No bugs or anything of the sort with the emulation across the board and every game works as they should.
For the two Amiga games, these look and sound as they should, and I think they’re in 60hz mode, but I’m not too sure (My TV doesn’t change like it does for some of the other Computer games, which is why I’m guessing here). One way or another, they’ve been optimized to play fine as such and I noticed no issues with the visual or audio emulation, meaning the excellent OSTS for both games are here in all their glory. Good soundtracks are a consistency across the franchise for the most part, so all of them being emulated well here is appreciated.
Gameplay
Normally for Evercade review I just go “and now, onto the games themselves” in this bit since these carts are pretty much just collections of games with not much extra, but I do need to note some differences with how these Turrican games emulate control aspects, since it appears Blaze added some tweaks to shortcut certain mechanics and make them consistent across all the games.
The two Amiga games have all the various mechanics mapped to buttons, and all the future console games are given similar control layouts if they don’t already have them. This means Mega Turrican gets extra button shortcuts for techniques you couldn’t normally do on a whim, ala Turrican Anthology/Flashback, so your bomb is usable while moving and in mid-air rather than forcing you to crouch down beforehand. It also means despite the game being a three button Genesis game, four features are mapped to buttons and the Rope button is mapped to L1/L2/Y by default.
Consider it a small set of QOL features, since beam/rope shortcuts are all on those buttons across the games, making it pretty comfortable to use that weapon. Hilariously, this also means Super Turrican 2’s cheat code that lets you skip levels is gone since there’s nothing mapped to the SNES A button.
Turrican– The original Amiga experience! Well, “original” in terms of what represents current Turrican at least. Factor 5 did the porting work for this action game, which was originally made for C64 in mind by Manfred Trenz. While that 8-bit version was a system pusher and a pretty fun time, this 16-bit one focused on polishing up that experience and getting the most out of the Amiga. A high quality OST playing with sound effects on, multiple layers and extra detail to the 16-bit graphics, and tight play control made for the Amiga version being pretty well regarded too, which is why Blaze likely picked this computer original over the console ports that cut down or messed with the game in some manner.
And boy, is the original Turrican still plenty of fun. You have a typical jump/attack setup, with this being an action game and all, but you also have multiple subweapons to use depending on the situation at hand. These range from incredibly powerful grenade bombs, screen-clearing land mines, a vertical wave beam, plus a helpful electrical beam you can aim 360 degrees around you. You also have two main weapons that drop from powerup blocks, with a very useful spread shot or a smaller, more annoying laser weapon to be your main method of taking out the enemies.
While most platformers at the time were linear affairs that had decent sized levels, or had optional items scattered around like candy that developers would mandate you go hunt down to open the exit, Turrican ditches the worst aspects of those kind of platformers and essentially lets you play through the stages however you please. Sure, you could bolt straight for the exit if you know where to go, but you could also explore the huge levels and go all over the place, off the beaten path, and discover some extra ammo for your weapons or hidden 1UPs. In fact, 1UPs are pretty darn easy to stack up on if you know where to look, and stumbling upon stockpiles of them early on isn’t tough at all. Thus, even without save states this first Turrican is a pretty good starting point and a game that won’t frustrate you too much at first.
Of course, not everything is perfect with this debut entry. Your health bar vanishes in seconds if you so much as nudge an enemy, some of the bosses are pretty dull or laughably easy, (the grenade seriously is overpowered) and the game really ramps up the confusing level design in the fourth world to the point Turrican is more interested in timing you out all the time than sending tough enemies to defeat you. Still, the exploration elements are really dang fun, and this first installment is still one of the best action games ever to come from the Amiga, and if the first game was so great…
Turrican II: The Final Fight– …Then the sequel will go all out and be even better! Indeed, Turrican II takes what the already impressive original game wanted to do and refined it as much as humanly possible to create what I argue is a top tier, if not arguably the best Amiga video game to ever exist. From an absurdly long (6 minute!) intro theme that’s godly throughout the entire runtime, to better graphics and more balanced level design, and a fantastic OST from start to finish, Turrican II really did pull out all the stops.
It also helps some of the gameplay gripes got fixed up. You only have the beam and the line attack as your secondary weapons, and neither are as broken as the Grenade in the last game, so the challenge as a whole is much, much higher. 1Ups aren’t dumped on you like candy anymore, but there are still plenty of hidden extra lives that you need to actually work to discover and stock up on. You also have a new weapon in the form of a rebounder shot, while both the spread shot and laser weapons got a nice buff so they’re more useful than last time.
To make an excellent game even better, the third world just goes for a complete genre shift and becomes a horizontal shooter. The third world of the original kinda did this with a vertical autoscroller, but here in Turrican II this is a proper horizontal shooter clearly inspired by R-Type and a really, really good one at that. Seriously, I thought Rendering Ranger R2‘s shooter sections were a phenomenal genre shift, but being reminded of how good the shooter world of Turrican II was made me realize that even that outstanding feat was blown out of the water by this earlier work. Being a megafan of horizontal shooting games, the shooting stages alone would be one of the best shooters on the Amiga, which makes me wish Katakis on Amiga was thrown in as a bonus game, since now I really wanna play that one.
Still, Turrican II could be summed up as “Bigger, Better, Turrican”. It took the great foundation from that first game, refined the crap outta it, threw in an excellent genre shift as a bonus, and somehow upped the difficulty without being too infuriating, at least until the second to last stage. I genuinely wonder how Amiga fans back in the day who played this ever could enjoy any future games for the system with this as the highest benchmark, and I can absolutely see why this game is most people’s favorite from the series.
Super Turrican– So what happens when you wanna move a computer series to console? Put it on the SNES and try to take advantage of the system! Unfortunately, Super Turrican manages to nail the gameplay feel really well, but not much else compared to the previous entries. The soundtrack is still excellent at the very least, with some catchy melodies, but nothing about this great OST screams “Super Nintendo limit pusher” to me. The graphics are pretty decent looking, but the game really, really loves to go hard on the gradient backgrounds for some stages and it isn’t until the third world that I’d consider this one a looker, but considering the feat Factor 5 pulled off on Amiga this one plays things pretty safe.
You have the three weapons returning from Turrican II, all of which are just as useful as they were before. (though the laser got nerfed) You also have your line attack again, but your beam got downgraded to a freeze weapon that no longer hurts enemies, but it does help against weaker foes. The stages are pretty decent, but the scale of the exploration was cut down by a lot, though that doesn’t mean you can’t find gems and hidden 1UPs if you go out of your way.
The good news is even if you struggle to find these 1UPs, Super Turrican is easy. Like, really, really easy. Easy enough I 1CC’d it without much issue until an autoscroller near the end of the game. Part of that has to do with how Super Turrican is basically unfinished, since a lot of ideas were put on the cutting room floor due to the downscaling of the cartridge size, including various enemies and boss characters. The third world doesn’t even have a boss fight and just ends, while the fourth world has no sense of finality at all and just comes across like another Alien world, only for you to beat the boss and oh hey, the game is just over now. No climatic, final battle or challenging final stage to go through.
A pretty decent step back from the previous entries, but at least the good news here is a scaled down Turrican is still a pretty fun action game, and with this being the easiest of the bunch by far, I actually recommend this one as the game to get into for newcomers. You no longer have to worry about that stupid health bar that drains in seconds, you finally have i-frames! The action is still satisfying and the levels that are here manage to be pretty fun, even if their visual design is lacking. All in all, a pretty solid SNES action game, but far less from the potential of what it could have been.
Turrican 3- The Amiga version of Mega Turrican! But while Mega Turrican needed a publisher and went on a long trek to prepare for one, this Amiga version was able to come out beforehand, and is thus a port of the Genesis game, which was made as its own thing alongside Super, originally being an Amiga game before being kicked off the platform for a while. Make sense?
Still, even if this one seems a tad redundant with two other versions of the game present, Turrican 3 ends the Amiga trilogy on a weird note. Gameplay wise you get more Turrican, only more linear, more action focused and with an incredibly fun grappling hook mechanic. But considering the first two Turrican games were technical masterpieces for the Amiga, Turrican 3 just looks fine by comparison.
The Genesis version’s great visuals are downgraded and look pretty washed out and cruddy here, and there are even a few very slight level tweaks done, though nothing gargantuan that makes this better or worse than Mega Turrican. All the stages are here and accounted for! It also helps the excellent OST from the Genesis game is carried over to the Amiga pretty darn well, with the only weak point being an out of place loading theme, and you even have the in-game voices. It might not be a system pusher anymore, but it still holds up pretty well against the original and for Amiga fans back in the day I could imagine it made people who couldn’t get the Mega Drive version pretty satisfied.
It also helps the game as a whole controls pretty tightly still. The playability of that Genesis/MD game still shines here, with the grappling rope being just as fun to use as it was on Genesis, and the level design in every single stage being excellent. Seriously, this is by far the best Turrican game in its original incarnation, so this Amiga port does a great job of transitioning that to the computer, so even this weird port manages to be one of my favorite games on the entire platform. If you could only pick one version though, I’d still prefer the Genesis one.
Mega Turrican– Oh hey, it’s the Genesis one. Anyhow this is the base version of that Amiga Turrican 3, and it shines the best on Genesis. From excellent level designs, to one of the best, if not the best western composed Genesis OSTs, all while refining the elements from Super Turrican and doing their darnest to make up for the incomplete feeling of that game, you pretty much end up with the definitive Turrican in my book.
Sure, you don’t have super duper huge levels to explore anymore, even if there are secrets within each world to find, and the game brings up arrows to help you in the stages you might get lost, but the action remains on point from start to finish. The weapons from Super Turrican are back but different looking, and now you also have the homing missile as an extra boost to your arsenal. Your line attacks are replaced by a screen clearing smart bomb, and these can come in real handy when you’re swarmed by enemies, giving you a pretty decent array of weapons that are mostly balanced well. (The Rebound shot obliterates anything with multiple hit points real quickly, so not everything was nailed in that aspect!)
Whereas the SNES game was pretty lacking on pushing the system to the extreme or even showing off much effects besides the pure basics, Mega Turrican makes up for that by trying to replicate scaling effects the Genesis couldn’t normally do, or having detailed backgrounds that look real nice in areas like World 3. A ton of games on the console would push the system harder than this, but Factor 5 still did an excellent job improving over that SNES installment, with each level being totally fun to play, that I still find Mega Turrican to be the best entry in the franchise all this time after I reviewed it on other consoles years ago.
For those who were disappointed by the abrupt end to Super Turrican, rejoice, since this game has a final stage that’s just pure awesome and definitely feels like a proper sendoff for ideas they couldn’t do the last time. Definitely the must play from this entire collection.
Super Turrican 2- So you hit peak gaming, and then what do you do next? Take a bit of time away, and then return to the SNES with a game that actually pushes the system quite a bit, and tries to shake things up a bit. Unfortunately, Super Turrican 2 fumbles a bit in the process, but still puts out a pretty decent game.
Now Factor 5 has gotten used to the SNES, and decided to do everything they can to make Super Turrican 2 as flashy as humanly possible. There are cool pre-rendered animations in cutscenes, the most visual detail of any Turrican game to date, and some pretty great uses of the SNES hardware via the various genre shifts the game throws at you. Indeed, you have a desert truck segment, a third person tunnel segment, an underwater shooter segment, an overhead, almost Axelay-like segment, all alongside the traditional side-scrolling Turrican action.
Sadly, I just didn’t feel that any of it hits as well as the prior games. Even when the genre shift in Turrican II happened, it was good enough to feel like its own game, but the stuff in Super 2 gets real obnoxious. You might do pretty OK in the underwater level since it’s still a side scrolling affair, but how about the third person racing bit that changes perspective and makes you deal with a lot more obstacles that can drain through your lives in no time? Add in some of the hardest stages in the entire franchise, and you have yourself one heck of a challenge to overcome here. The Evercade doesn’t map the A button to anything either, so no level skip cheat for you!
There’s also the fact that the main stages are very linear this time around, and I’m talking linear as in “you have to go in a straight path, with barely any hidden things to find at all”. These aren’t bad levels to play, and the playability is still pretty solid and carries over a lot of the things from the first Super Turrican, (and adds the grapple hook from Mega) but it definitely feels like it wants to be a Gunstar Heroes more than a Turrican. The music also took a huge step back, still being done by the same composer but now going for a score that sounds like a movie soundtrack, which is lame. Still, you at least get a final boss fight that feels like an apology for how the first Super ended, but I still found Mega to be the far better game.
Super Turrican: Director’s Cut– So you know how I mentioned that Super Turrican is pretty much incomplete, with one world lacking a boss and the final world being something that has no sense of finality to it at all? Well, here’s Super Turrican Director’s Cut, which was the 6MB version’s last prototype before cuts got made. Note the word “Prototype” there, since while the DC has been pitched as a “finished” or “more complete” version over the years, it really isn’t. It also had one of the worst video game trailers known to man.
So let’s talk about the cool things they added. The Snow World (World 3) has a slightly longer first stage that sports a brand new enemy, with a gimmick of using your beam to melt the ice off them. Then you get on a train, and suddenly you’re in a brand new stage taking place on a flying battle ship! This is a pretty fun new level that helps extend an otherwise lacking world, and being able to fight new enemies not in the original version was pretty cool. Unfortunately, once it ends the rest of World 3 is like normal, meaning no boss for the stage.
Likewise, if you were hoping for that in-game ending to make any sense and maybe I dunno, a final boss or final world to have been a thing in Director’s Cut, you aren’t getting that either. The game still ends after an otherwise unchanged World 4, just as anticlimactically as before. So is more complete better than less complete, even if DC isn’t truly complete? I think that depends on what kind of player you are; if you want more levels and more stuff, this is the better version since you get a new fun stage and a slightly longer one.
Now if you prefer polish as I do for these games, then I actually am gonna buck conventional wisdom and prefer the released version. Don’t get me wrong, the new content is fun, but what you gain through that is the loss of some things that they did add for the final version; some visual effects, fixing of graphical glitches, and general polish all around. It feels incredibly bizarre to be taking an elevator in the final stage only for it to be completely mute because they hadn’t got around to it yet.
If there were more additions to DC all around or some semblence of a proper final stage, I’d be able to wave the polish away, but personally I just prefer the released version. Neither version is particularly a fulfilling experience, but you still get a fun game either way even if you’ll wish there was more to it. At least Mega Turrican gave us the definitive 16-Bit experience.
Super Turrican: Score Attack– For Gamescom to promote the Turrican Anthology sets, Factor 5 threw together a weird hacked together version of Super Turrican that locks you into a single level and tasks you with getting as high of a score as possible. To accomplish this, said level is gargantuan and feels more like the first two Turrican games than anything in the actual Super Turrican game, and collecting as many 1UPs and gems as possible while trying to make it to the exit in the time limit is key. The stated inspiration was the Hudson Caravan events, and I can absolutely see that mentality reflected in this stage.
See, you could beeline to the exit ASAP, but then your rank at the end won’t be as high. So you could take careful time getting all the 1UPs and gems without losing any, but if you run out of time you don’t get a time bonus. That means if you want the ultimate rank you gotta route out the stage and prepare for the best course of action, and that makes for quite a fun challenge and a great way to make full use of the Super Turrican mechanics. The stage is pretty darn tough too, but hey, if you like the collecting aspect and want to fiddle around with that more, this is a cute little diversion.
Mega Turrican: Director’s Cut– This game makes less sense for a Director’s Cut than Super. At least with Super you can point to how the game had to be cut down in size for a smaller cartridge, and how the Director’s Cut was still adding content cut from the original game back in, even if it did so by just being a beta version that still lacked a proper final world.
Mega Turrican on the other hand, didn’t really have much in the way of cuts. The Genesis original was on a big cartridge from the start and outside of a stage having to be hidden away from normal play due to a publisher request, the full game released was as it was intended to be released. So what does this Director’s Cut add to the best of the bunch? Not much, to be honest. You have the secret stage in World 1 added back as a normal level, meaning you get an extra bit of gameplay through a pretty spacious level akin to the first two games, and Mario and Sonic are stuck in capsules in the first level. No, that was not a typo.
Otherwise, this is just Mega Turrican, once again. Do you want to replay an outstanding game for a third time in a row? I mean hey, I didn’t mind doing so, and then doing so once more on a real cartridge since this game still rules, but by and large this is the most filler game of the entire package here, since it really doesn’t add all that much. You could have overwrote the OG Mega Turrican here and lost nothing, or could have left this version off and still lost nothing due to that extra stage being a secret in the OG. It doesn’t have any noticeable weird bugs that I could tell like Super Director’s Cut did, so this is pretty much just a final polish on an already phenomenal game.
Mega Turrican: Score Attack– The Score Attack Super got, but for Mega! Except this time around, Mega’s level is heavily tailored toward the grappling hook and feels more like that secret level from the actual game rather than something outside the box. Same concept as before, get all the 1UPs/Gems and get to the exit fast for a higher rank, and this one is easily the better Score Attack.
You have more leeway for one thing, you get to make good use of the grapple mechanic, and the stage is much more memorization friendly than the Super one. It also helps that Mega Turrican is just the better game to play, so that tighter control and fun weapon selection (yes, the broken Rebound is just as effective here) comes in handy to make this bonus pretty addicting! Any excuse to play more Mega Turrican is a good one, and with this being a brand new level full of secrets I had a blast replaying through the stage yet again.
Conclusion
In conclusion, The Turrican Collection is easily one of the best Evercade releases to date, even surpassing how modern consoles have handled the games by having all of them in one place instead of split across multiple carts. It helps that every single game in the collection is decent to outstanding, with only Super Turrican 2 being a game I’d consider just average, and just so many excellent platformers one after the other really makes for a great set of hours to go through them all.
Whether you’re a newcomer to this franchise, or only played a singular game in the series, or enjoyed all of them elsewhere, this is more than worthy of being in your Evercade collection. Outside of the three games that are legal impossibilities, (Super Turrican NES, 8 Bit Turrican 1/2) everything is here and its quite a feat to have an entire series chronology on a single Evercade carts, yet alone one consistently as good as Turrican. When the only minor gripe I have is that you can’t do a single cheat code anymore, action fans rejoice!
I give The Turrican Collection a 9 out of 10.