TechnoCop

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You are a cop riding a police super-car and chasing criminals. The game starts with a highway action racing through the Roadblasters mould. The objective is to spot and reach the criminal's hideout in a limited amount of time. Unfortunately life isn't that easy because the drivers of the other cars adopt kamikaze driving (since they are fellow criminals protecting the boss). Your car is equipped with an automatic five-speed gear-box and a standard blaster. It can accelerate out of trouble leaving a trail of debris from wasted enemy vehicles. When you reach the criminal's hideout the action changes into a 2D horizontal scrolling platform shoot 'em up. The car door opens and Technocop jumps out. Your gadget-packed wristband is activated displaying information about the mission and the specific criminal that must be caught, dead or alive. Following the radar you can locate each adversary and either destroy foes using your weapon or bag them with a net. Oh yes, your pistol's ammo can be switched (by pressing Spacebar) to either shooting bullets or throwing nets! As long as you catch the main criminal, you can then return to your car and go to the next stage, following the same scenario, but with different villains each time. After each successful stage Technocop is promoted on the police ranks and enhancements of speed and firepower are added to his car.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game's visuals look nice and can also be gory at times, especially on he 16 bot versions. The CPC version looks fine especially in the driving-part with nice details and color usage. The side scrolling part though looks a bit dark and sprites a bit chunky. The interior of buildings features exploding bodies that twitch post-mortally, but the scrolling seems to suffer at times. All villains look like being taken from a Mad Max movie and are nicely animated but drawn quite differently than the 16 bit version. The action is squeezed into the top half of the screen in order for the car interior (at the driving part) or the computer wristband to be visible (at the 2D scrolling part). The effects are solid gun-shots as well as engine sounds fulfilling their purpose, but doing little to more enhance the game.

GAMEPLAY VIDEO
On our Techno Cop compilation video, the Amstrad CPC version is at: 06.01.