The Turrican series is the stuff of legend for European home computer owners. Back when the C64 and Amiga ruled supreme, Manfred Trenz's brilliant run-and-gun action title was considered to be the gold standard – so much so that it would be ported to a wide range of other platforms, including home consoles, and was even adapted (or butchered, depending on your viewpoint) to form the basis of 1992's official Universal Soldier video game on Genesis / Mega Drive and Game Boy.

The Turrican Collection on Evercade follows a similar release pattern to many of the system's other retro packs, as we already have Turrican Flashback and Turrican Anthology Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, which were released on modern-day systems a few years back.

However, this Evercade release offers one significant advantage over those packs – it has a much wider selection of games, rather than splitting up the roster across multiple digital versions and physical special editions. Flashback, for example, only included four games, while the Anthology releases annoyingly carved up the roster between them.


The Turrican Collection, on the other hand, offers six games – Turrican (Amiga), Turrican 2 (Amiga), Super Turrican (SNES), Turrican 3 (Amiga), Mega Turrican (Mega Drive / Genesis), Super Turrican 2 (SNES), as well as director's cuts and score attack variants of Mega Turrican and Super Turrican. What's even better is that Blaze has adapted the Amiga editions to make use of Evercade's additional buttons, making for a more pleasurable experience overall.

While many consider the first two Turrican games on Amiga to be the crowning glory of the series, there's no denying that the full roster of titles represents some of the best run-and-gun action ever produced by European developers, and even today it's amazing to see how Factor 5 (which ported to the game from C64 to Amiga) was able to make Commodore's 16-bit computer truly sing. Chris Huelsbeck, who has become synonymous with the franchise thanks to his amazing music, really did know how to get a good tune out of the Amiga.

It's a shame, then, that the original C64 versions of the first two games aren't included here – Trenz has previously said that he considers the original C64 game to be the definitive version of Turrican, even if it lacks the visual and sonic impact of its Amiga-based sibling. Even so, this is a relatively minor complaint when faced with such an excellent selection of titles; this is yet another must-have Evercade release, and no mistake.