TurnOn

I had seen quite a few people playing TurnOn over the last few months and I thought I would give it a go. It looked to be a bit of a strange one with a quick completion estimate but a hefty achievement list and those two things don’t normally go hand in hand.

The game follows the story of a... ball of electricity which appears to go on a mission to restore power to a town after some kind of experiment, which appears to create the electricity ball, drains the city of power. Your job is to use power cables to traverse across various landscapes interacting with power boxes and other things to turn on all the lights.

The interaction sees you move between planes in 3D as if they are 2D... which isn’t a very good explanation. Basically if you can see a cable in the background but you can jump high enough to touch it you will transfer in to the background. Likewise if you jump off the end a cable, you will be caught by any cable below you regardless of what plane you are in. This makes dying difficult but very possible as I found out. Repeatedly.

There is a three-star score system for each level and you have to get a certain amount of points to get three stars. You get points by collecting small lightning bolts and turning on lights, power boxes and fans. Some of these objects are slightly hidden and you will need to explore in order to get the three stars.

There are also speed levels where you move really fast along mainstream power lines. These are the trickiest parts of game as you almost have to know what’s coming up to avoid dying. A lot. Which i didn’t do.

Graphically it does what it should which is allow you to clearly see your surroundings in terms of what you can and can’t interact with. Musically, my God, it’s annoying especially in certain levels when trying to get three stars and constantly replaying the same tune over and over again. In fact, it was almost like the game didn’t like it either as, at certain points, the music would fully glitch out and stop completely.

Speaking of glitches, the music one was relatively frequent but I also had a game glitch where, on one of the speed levels, the speed of my ball did not increase which made it impossible to make certain jumps. This also didn’t fix itself so I had to restart the game to get it to work properly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 82 Achievements

Of the 82 achievements, only 20 are truly story related but not many of them are that tough either. You basically have to get three lamps in each level and if you do this as you go, you will get three achievements per level so they come thick and fast.

The normal levels are okay and there is a quite a wide margin for error but the speed levels are where all the difficult achievements are. However, there is a trick. You can ‘die’ and restart from the last checkpoint to pick up any lightning bolts you miss on the first sweep. Despite this trick, I still cocked up loads and had to listen to shit music on repeat.

Downloadable Content – N/A

TurnOn is an okay game. It’s an original concept with a semblance of story without any actual narrative. Achievements wise, it is 82 achievements you can easily add to your collection and if you’re like me (unskilled) you can do it in less than 5 hours.