Turrican

About

Turrican is a side-scrolling shooter-platformer where you navigate five distinct worlds teeming with hostile creatures. As a genetically engineered warrior, you’ll blast, jump, and explore labyrinthine levels while clearing each biome of mutated threats. The controls emphasize precision: timing your shots and leaps is key to surviving increasingly chaotic environments. Each world culminates in a boss fight, with the final stage pitting you against three versions of the rogue AI MORGUL. The game balances horizontal platforming with vertical challenges, often requiring you to backtrack using newly acquired abilities. The game’s 1990 release on Commodore 64 made it a standout for its tight mechanics and varied level design. It later spread to over a dozen platforms including Sega Mega Drive and ZX Spectrum, proving its adaptability. With a sequel arriving just a year later, Turrican II, the series built on its foundation of relentless action. While modern ratings are scarce, retro communities praise its difficulty curve and inventive use of power-ups. The story of a bio-engineered hero battling a sentient ecosystem adds a layer of dark sci-fi flair to the straightforward gameplay.

Storyline

The lost colony of Alterra is a completely man-made lifeworld abandoned long ago in a nearby galaxy. Alterra is actually five colonies in one. Each self-contained habitat has been separately bio-engineered by a powerful ecosystem generation network known as a Multiple Organism Unit Link. MORGUL, for short. Early colonists used MORGUL to render Alterra inhabitable. But a cataclysmic quake severed all system interface functions, and MORGUL murderously rebelled. The few colonists lucky enough to escape told a grim tale of a higher intelligence gone berserk. For generations, mankind sought a return to Alterra. Finally, genetic science created a saviour: Turrican, a mutant warrior, bio-engineered for the task of planetary reclamation. In the meantime, MORGUL has diligently twisted Alterran life forms to his brutal, destructive purposes. Thus, Turrican's challenges consist of eliminating hostile organisms from Alterra's five multi-level worlds and, finally, destroying the three faces of MORGUL.