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. His 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. There is no notable difference between the Amiga and the Atari ST version, as they are almost identical, except of the scrolling in which the Amiga version is smoother! The driving section is well put together with smooth road action and nice engine sampled sounds. The speed the programmers achieved in Technocop's scrolling and animation is really impressive. The action sequences inside buildings features exploding bodies that twitch post-mortally, but the scrolling seems to suffer at times (odd for an Amiga). All villains look like being taken from a Mad Max movie and are nicely animated and drawn. The action is squeezed into the top half of the screen in order for the car interior or the computer wristband to be visible. The sound consists of high quality sampled effects like gunfire, explosions, screams, engines and so on, all adding to the gory atmosphere of this title!

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga and Sega Mega Drive versions of the game.
The Amiga version is at 27:16.