Turrican II: The Final Fight

About Turrican II: The Final Fight

Turrican II: The Final Fight (1991) is Factor 5's Amiga run and gun in which Bren McGuire, sole survivor of the Avalon 1, dons the Turrican suit to avenge his crew against The Machine.

Turrican II: The Final Fight in Depth

In 3025 the United Planets Freedom Forces keep peace across the galaxy. The ship Avalon 1, commanded by Colonel Ardon C. Striker, is preparing to cross the galaxy's barrier when a huge battlecruiser appears and, with unknown technology, disables every defence. Mutants pour through a ruptured airlock and wipe out the crew in hand-to-hand fighting. The evil emperor The Machine, half-man and half-robot, steps on the body of soldier Bren McGuire and declares the crew no more, but Bren is alive. Alone, he reaches the equipment room, climbs into one of the new Turrican fighting suits and cries "Revenge!"

The game is described as a cross between Metroid, which inspired its huge, detailed labyrinth levels and morph-ball function, and Psycho-Nics Oscar, which inspired its graphics and weapons. Five distinct worlds are split across eleven levels, each with its own theme by Chris Huelsbeck, before a final showdown with The Machine. A music menu, reached with the space bar on the Amiga, lets players listen to every track. The soundtrack is widely regarded as one of Huelsbeck's best, and it was performed live by an orchestra at the second Symphonic Game Music Concert in 2004. Technically it boasts seven-layer parallax scrolling.

Making Turrican II: The Final Fight

The Amiga and Atari ST versions began development in May 1990 and were released by Rainbow Arts in February 1991. Like its predecessor it was originally coded on the Commodore 64, but most of the code was new: Holger Schmidt explained that "all we really kept were the scrolling routines. Everything else was optimized and rewritten because we needed more processing time for the sprites and animation." Trenz told The One that he always found titles in the phone book, since "there's loads of good material out there". It was also released for the CDTV, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and MS-DOS, and later for Mega Drive and Game Boy.