Review | Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip (PS5) - A Triumph Of Travesty
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip (say that 5 times fast) is a 3D open world sandbox game that focuses a lot on the personality of the world and its characters over flashy mechanics. It does so in much to its benefit as well as detriment. It’s a giant mixed bag of gags and wit that largely works well within the confines of a story about a lonely boy with big big dreams. Similarly to the dog chasing a car, Terry just may have not thought about the ramifications of his dreams actually coming true.
Originally released on PC back in May of 2024 by Snekflat, Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip has now been ported to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch. The game begins with our hero Terry, who is applying for a job that comes with a car. He gets the car with zero intention of actually working but to upgrade it enough to get to outer space. From the jump you are given a car and access to the entire map. You can jump and drive around the city collecting money and Turbo Junk, a currency used to upgrade your car to drive to space. You also slowly unlock new items like weapons, insect nets and parachutes that add new features to your exploration.
The PS5 port of the game is kind of a mess. The game runs relatively smoothly as long as it’s in a fixed camera view. Once you start to spin the camera around, especially if there’s foliage, it begins to chug something fierce. Stuttering is pretty normal in the larger forested areas, but funny enough, in densely populated downtown sections it could handle the large amount of characters onscreen. That is, until I would spin the camera around to get everything around Terry rendered. Also, when changing into other biomes, there’s a decent amount of pop- in as well. The game is also releasing on the Nintendo Switch on the same day, and I have been informed that the issues remain similar on that platform. In that sense, this is a game that might be best played on PC.
If you didn’t feel like grinding through the game, though, there are a smattering of quests that can be performed for bonus Turbo Junk. These can be as easy as visiting Terry’s apartment or as complicated as finding missing Gummypup blueprints across the map. I highly recommend these — otherwise the game ends up feeling like a bit of a slog. There are definitely interesting activities that can occur across the city, but they are few and far between. That’s actually one of my issues with the city of Sprinklewater. It’s densely populated with people, and it’s built in quite an interesting form over function kind of way with highway exits and multilayered locations, but outside of the few key locales denoted on your map, it can sometimes feel devoid of meaningful activity.
Even getting as far as exploring Sprinklewater, the quests aren’t immediately apparent. A few are presented initially, but after that it’s up to you to figure out how to initiate them. You would have to poke at every part of the map and exhaust every dialogue choice before something may unlock and that feels like a bummer. There’s easily missable content within a game that has a fairly limited content pool as is. Even the initial ramp up took some time until I felt like I had a grasp of what I was even doing. There could have easily been a little more onboarding or initial lead in to the world instead of just a flat drop. This can be taken as a perk, but I found it jarring.
Where the game does shine is in the cutscenes and dialogue that can occur during quests. It’s clear from the beginning that Sprinklewater functions within a lawless society but also in one that communicates monosyllabically. Connecting those two things can make for some really solid comedy. Especially when you dig into those quests and get more context to what exactly is going on with Terry, but also the larger world he lives in. There’s a little more depth than I assumed initially but not a ton more. It’s the humor that drives everything forward.
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip’s console port works decently well, but decent is the key modifier. There’s a ton of fun to be had for sure. The world is built as a collection of ludicrous scenarios for you to exploit for comedy. These are also usually punctuated with some solid gags from the charming citizens of Sprinklewater. I started out skeptical but by the time the credits rolled I was largely charmed by Terry’s quest to get to space. Everything about that character spoke to me as someone so overly ambitious that it borders on idiocy. Unfortunately, it took quite a bit of time to get to that point with a lack of direction and a lot of performance issues. In the end, I think that Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a triumph of travesty, that can win you over despite its flaws. If you are playing on console over PC, temper your expectations.
