Developed by Factor 5 and published by Ocean in 1995. Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro Add me on Google+: http://bit.ly/1tPwL1u It seems that evil never sleeps and that The Machine has returned, determined to enslave the inhabitants of every planet in the known universe. The United Freedom Forces aboard the U.S.S. Avalon launch a squadron of fighters in an attempt to end The Machine's reign of terror, heading into a black hole to reach their next destination. Unfortunately, only a single ship emerges and even that is badly damaged. Crashing on a distant desert world, our unnamed hero clambers into the super Turrican suit and heads out into the dunes, intent on completing the mission. Factor 5 found fame in the early 90's with their superb Turrican games on the Commodore Amiga and C64 home computers. A few years later they would bring updated sequels to both Sega Mega Drive and SNES consoles. I'd never played these Turrican games, so I was curious to found out whether they were any good. As much as I'm a fan of Turrican II on the Amiga, I have to admit that the production values of Super Turrican 2 are noticeably better in almost every respect. The game opens with some very nicely randered 3D cut-scenes, a trend which continues throughout the game. Turrican was never that big on story, but it's still a nice touch. The game doesn't stray far from it's platform-shooter origins, but the level design is much tighter and less meandering than those that I was used to. Although one could say the game is quite linear when compared to the level designs in Turrican and Turrican II, this game is a much more focussed experience; very rarely did I ever find myself wondering where to go or what to do. The designers clearly wanted to keep the player entertained, so they continually mix things up by introducing 3D chase stages with some impressive Mode-7 style scaling and rotation effects, horizontal chase scenes and even underwater sections. As in previous games, the hero has a number of different weapons available. Each gun has certain advantages and disadvantages depending on the enemies being faced. For example, the spread-shot covers a wide area of the screen but it relatively weak, whilst the flamer is extremely powerful but travels across the screen relatively slowly and has reduced range. The gyroscope makes a return but really doesn't ever need to be used, whilst the iconic lightning whip and "surround" attacks from previous games have been dropped altogether. Replacing them is an extending bionic claw that allows the player to grab hold of and swing from platforms in a manner reminiscent of Capcom's Bionic Commando games. Series regular Chris Hülsbeck returns with some more great tunes and even the sound effects are worthy of note, with fantastically meaty explosions when bad guys get blown up. Although there's no doubt that Super Turrican 2 is a polished and entertaining game, it's not without a few faults. Firstly, I found that some of the boss fights confusing at first since the game doesn't always make it clear what you're meant to do. For example, I couldn't understand what the Manta Ray boss was knocking me off the vehicle (scripted) or that I could actually jump through the darker-shaded areas of it's tail. The other issue I had was that some sections require the ability to jump, grapple with the hook and shoot simultaneously, which meant I was doing a fair amount of button mashing at times, usually resulting in me accidentally unlatching the grapple and falling to my doom. As the game progressed I did get more adept at the multitasking aspects. All things considered, Super Turrican 2 is a really solid action game, certainly a title that sits alongside some of the top games in the genre. It's not the longest game in the series, but this is certainly a case of quality-over-quantity, and this has quality in spades.