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 DOS version visuals look nice and support only EGA or CGA adapters. There's notable difference between this and the Amiga / Atari ST versions in the quality, sound and feel. The color and detail limitation of the EGA graphics is quite obvious. The driving section is well put together but it suffers in smoothness during road action. Inside buildings, you explode bodies that twitch post-mortally, but the scrolling runs in flip-screen, so walking from one side of a room to the other, causes the game to scroll an entire screen at a time until the next area is revealed. The sprites, though, are good and they look like being taken from a Mad Max movie! The action takes place at the top half of the screen so that the car's dashboard or the computer wristband are visible. The sound it's this version's weakest point and offers simplistic sound effects that cover gunfire, engine sounds etc.