Originally written by Heikki Kosola for the Commodore Amiga between 1991 and 1993, and fully published as shareware in 1993.
The game was eventually released as freeware into public domain in 1998.
A PC remake called "Turboraketti Remake 2020" was developed by TapanilanKTT, and released through itch.io in 2020.
NOTE: The floppy disk picture on the left is my personal estimation of what a professionally manufactured disk of the game could have looked like. No such thing exists.
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INTRODUCTION/PRELUDE
Thanks for your patience. Now that I finally have my things set up more or less as they should be, I figured it might be a good idea to get back to blogging with something light-weight, so here's another Finnish Retro Game Review to start things off at my new blogging headquarters. This one puts more weight on the attempt to keep the balance more in the 1990's, and out of all the plausible choices for the Finnish Retro Games I have left to review, Turboraketti is one of the more important and influential ones, making way for an astounding number of cave flying games to pop up from the Finnish independent game developing scene for many years to come.
Mayhem, apparently by some unnamed Norwegian guy, is a four-player dog-fighting cave flyer from 1991, which has a simple design, hard to find controls and can boast of five different caves to fly around in. The second multiplayer Amiga cave flyer that I found was one called Baum, developed by Noxious Team and released in April 1992, which seems to have only one area to play in, but features more weapons and a couple of more options. Both games have lower scores than Turboraketti at LemonAmiga, but at least we have established some sort of a base to compare Turboraketti to.
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TURBOREVIEW
Because there's still a fair amount of uncertainty among gamers about the Turboraketti releases, let's clear that up first. There are two distinctly different versions of the game: a beta release, which has the version number 0.99, and the full release, which for some reason was numbered 2.0. This naturally makes the latter version often listed as Turboraketti II, which it isn't. The game was originally presented all in Finnish, and with the eventual success it had, an English translated version was called for. This, however, became a fan project, and wasn't finished until 2023, and it was released with everything else translated but the title of the game.
The first brilliant thing about Turboraketti is, that it's practically all-inclusive for Amiga gamers. You only need a stock Amiga 500 with no extra RAM, and you will be able to play the game. The beta version's readme file says, that the larger maps might require more RAM for you to be able to play them, and indeed, if you have no extra RAM, you cannot access the two largest maps. Then again, most old Amiga users would have at least that extra 0.5 Mb RAM on their A500's, so it probably never was that much of a problem. Even so, the larger maps were taken out of the full version, so it could be played entirely on a stock A500.
The second brilliant thing about Turboraketti is, that there's more to it than meets the eye at first. Most cave flyers concentrate on one goal, and one goal alone: destroying your competitor(s) more times than they can destroy you. To be fair, this was very much the case in the beta version of Turboraketti, but the full release had a bit more to focus on. Your primary focus is on the rankings, which doesn't operate particularly straight-forward. You can, and likely will focus your efforts on destroying your opponents to reach that goal, but you also have the option to race around tracks built within the levels, which also affect your scores. There is some sort of a handicap system in the game, which doesn't really make much sense to me, but it doesn't really take away from the playability.
Left: Beta v0.99 title screen. - Middle: 1998 freeware version's loading screen.
Right: Final v2.0 title screen.
Of course, from a reviewer's point of view, Turboraketti is a bit difficult to review, because it requires a second player to participate, so I asked some help from my cousin Pete for this one, as I knew him to be more of an expert on cave flyers than most of my gaming acquaintance. This requirement doesn't become apparent until you have started the game, because the title screen only requires you to select the map to play in, adjust the amount of gravity for the game, and choose whether or not you want to have the ranking mode on. Once the map has been selected, the game will load into profile selection, in which you can choose one of two preset profiles (Turbo and Raketti), or register a new profile (Uusi Nimi), or if you choose not to play a ranked game, you can select the first option that says "Ei kukaan" - which means nobody. Now, at this point, at the very latest, it is advisable to have both controller ports occupied by a joystick, because a mouse can act funny. However, the beta version has this profile selection still largely unimplemented, so you can't really do much else than select "Ei kukaan" and get along with it.
If you choose to establish your own clean profiles, you can add a new profile, or just rename the two available ones, since they're untouched. For what is considered one of the best games of the genre, the name entering process is one of the most user-unfriendly things I have ever seen in any game. Selecting a new profile, or editing an old one's name, requires you to pull the joystick right for five seconds before you are taken to the name editing screen. Then, you select "Editoi" from the three items, which should be self-explanatory, if you speak English; the other two items are "Valmis", which means Finished, and "Poista", which means Delete. You edit the name with your joystick, up and down to choose the letter, and left and right to choose the location of your cursor. This is such a time consuming and unnecessary thing for casual players, that it's easier to just start the game with no profile, or go with the Turbo and Raketti profiles.
Name registering and statistics.
Left: Beta v0.99. - Middle: Final v2.0 name registering. - Right: Final v2.0 statistics.
Once you finally start the game, those of you less familiar with the genre might want to get familiar with the type of controlling this game has. As you might have noticed from earlier, there is some sort of gravity included in the game, which you yourself set up in the title screen before selecting the map. You can choose to have anything from basically no gravity at all, to a very aggressive gravity, which makes controlling the ships really hard work. Pressing the fire button thrusts your triangular ship forwards, left and right turn the ship accordingly, and pushing the joystick forward will shoot your primary weapon. When you're on your starting platform, pulling the joystick down will let you alter your weapons, the amount of bullets and fuel you carry, and even save your preferences. When you're flying, pulling down will fire your special weapon. The important difference between the beta version and the finished game is, that in the beta version, there are only four weapons available (two main weapons and two specials), and the number was upgraded to eight (four main and four specials) for the full version.
Ship modification screens. Left: Beta v0.99 - Right: Final v2.0.
What is still rather rare, if not unique, in cave flying games, is that the amount of stuff you carry in your ship affects the ship's speed, which helps in lap times, but with higher speed, you will need to know the maps like the contents of your pockets. Then again, you might want to be better prepared for dog-fighting, so in a sense, Turboraketti is a highly strategic cave flying game, making it one of the most replayable games of the genre.
If you're already a fan of Turboraketti, you might want to hold on to both versions - the beta and the finished one - because both versions feature a vastly different line-up of maps. The only map common for both versions is a map called Ekolos, which has only been altered a little for the finished game. Both versions only feature five maps, though, with the beta version featuring the two largest maps: Isemania and Mutolos. Naturally, since the beta version is a work-in-progress version of the finished Turboraketti, the graphical style is still rough, to say the least, with the Ekolos map looking the closest to the maps that would appear in the finished game. To view the full maps for both versions, you can find them from the Turboraketti shrine.
Beta v0.99 in-game screens + end of round screen.
My cousin Pete, who is more of a fan of the genre, his comment on the controls was, that they're extremely accurate, and the modifiability of the ship was a unique thing among cave flyers. However, he was initially confused about the simultaneous dog-fighting and racing gameplay choices, and the convoluted scoring system felt a bit unnecessarily complex, which I fully agree on. Then again, neither of us grew up with this game, so we have no idea, how the serious Turboraketti fans of old would have taken the whole TurboRANKING idea.
Final v2.0 in-game screens + end of round screen.
Lastly, the sounds. With a game such as this, the sounds are, as a rule, the least important and interesting part of the game. That's not to say the sounds aren't adequate, as they certainly are, but rather, there is no music at all in either version of the game, and there are no special map specific noises. It's all just air blowing noises, some pings, weapon shots and explosions. Then again, perhaps having in-game music would have been intrusive and perhaps even annoying, if it wasn't perfectly fitting for the game, so I suspect we're better off with what little there is.
I have to be honest, I was never that big a fan of cave flying games, apart from the likes of Gravitar and Thrust, which were more mission-based than deathmatch or racing-based. Then again, I have always been more of a single-player campaign mode gamer than a versus mode gamer. Thanks to Turboraketti's peculiar take on the genre, though, I find it easily one of the most interesting and impressive games of its kind, and it definitely deserves more attention than it has been given, despite its restrictive multiplayer-only style. My cousin still prefers Wings (by Miika Virpioja, 1996) on the PC over this.
0.99B FINAL
PLAYABILITY 8 9
GRAPHICS 6 8
SOUNDS 5 5
REPLAY VALUE 6 9
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OVERALL 7 8.5
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VIDEO & FINAL WORDS
The most official Turboraketti website is very likely Zuulikuuli's website, which was updated as recently as January 2003, and was apparently given blessings by Heikki Kosola himself. You can find both versions of the game from there, although the beta is only available as an .lha file, so if you want to find a more emulator friendly version, head on to AMI Sector One to find an .adf instead.
After almost 30 years of waiting, we finally have a PC version now - a faithful remake of sorts, which is available at itch.io, and is well worth a look. It's simply titled Turboraketti Remake 2020, and not only does it finally bring the game to PC gamers as authentically as one could ever want, but also, there are some optional modernizations included, such as music, a four player mode, and support for analog controls. This remake was last updated in March 2025, so there still seems to be some focus on it, and I must applaud TapanilanKTT for making this remake in the first place, and also for keeping up perfecting it. Check it out.
So, because of the existence of this remake, I decided to include it in my video accompaniment for this entry. Perhaps this might raise some further interest, so have a look here:
That's another Finnish Retro Game Review done, and I still have a few on my to-do list, before things get too recent. Hope you enjoyed that one, or at least learned something new. Thanks for reading/watching, see you next time, whenever that may be!
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