YMMV / Turrican

• Awesome Music:
  • Pretty much every game in the series, especially Turrican II. In fact, that game had a live orchestral performance of Turrican II's soundtrack in Leipzig, Germany.
  • Listen to the Super Turrican's Stage 1-3 theme if you want a slower, more bass-filled, and more ominous theme reminiscent of The Terminator theme until it hits a more hopeful crescendo, like a soldier's inner struggle between hope and despair. The Mega Turrican version of the same theme offers more synth and a faster, high-octane pace for those adrenalin junkies who prefer a thumping track with better, crisper snares reminiscent of the Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack.
• Even Better Sequel: Turrican 2 has bigger worlds, better weapons, improved graphics and possibly the best music.
• Fridge Logic: If the crew in the intro of Turrican II had one-man-army super suits on board, why didn't anyone put them on during the (narrated) lengthy wait between the arrival of the enemy battleship and the boarding?
  • Easily explained, as the wave which shut down all of Avalon 1's defenses probably also shut down the suits, and the crew was surrounded in a limited space and could not risk said super suits falling into the enemy's hands.
• Funny Moments: II has a couple.
  • In 2-2, Bren stands on a lift that collapses, causing him to let out an amusing digitized scream and suffer from Circling Birdies for a few seconds once he lands.
  • In 4-1, Bren lands the ship... by ramming it into a Walker that was in the hangar.
• Game-Breaker: In Turrican 3, you can find a secret powerup in the beginning of the second world. This turns your suit gold and your powerups will no longer downgrade if you lose a life. However, getting a Game Over and continuing will lose the suit. This is absent in the original Mega Turrican version.
  • Wheel mode in Turrican II has no limitations and makes you immune to nearly all forms of damage, making it trivially easy to pass through screen-filling lasers unscathed.
• Goddamned Bats: Robot bee hives, especially if you don't have a levelled wide-angle weapon. Also the, well, bats in World 4 of the original, which are hard to hit and constantly spawn clones which spawn more clones.
• I Am Not Shazam: Starting from II onward, Turrican is the name of the Powered Armor worn by the hero (Bren McGuire in II and Mega, unnamed in both Super games). The first game's protagonist is named Turrican, however.
• Narm: The Universal Soldier incarnation of Turrican II (see below) replaced the original bosses with that of the movie without adjusting their scaling. Thus instead of Bren McGuire fighting various robots, you have Luc Devereux fighting a gigantic Andrew Scott.
• Porting Disaster: The first two Turrican games suffered from this. The Mega Drive/Genesis port was the most intact, but had clunky controls; The TurboGrafx-16 had the same clunky controls and also was missing all of world 3 and had a limited soundtrack; and the Game Boy also has a world missing as well as sluggish controls. Turrican II was worse. It was released as Universal Soldier as a movie tie-in for the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Boy. Ouch.
• That One Level: World 4 in Turrican is a massive three part maze with creepy ambient sound instead of the Awesome Music featured everywhere else. Power-ups are much harder to find than normal, and even if you know where to go, dozens of pixel-perfect (and sometimes entirely illogical) jumps are required to reach the exit. All of the womb levels in the sequels have similar length and difficulty, but the first one took the cake.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: See Porting Disaster above. Other examples include Mega Turrican/Turrican 3 and Super Turrican 2 having more linear levels, and both Super Turrican (SNES game) and Super Turrican 2 had your lightning beam changed from an attack to freezing enemies.