Techno Cop

"You have the right to remain bored."

Impeccable control, eye-popping visual effects, and furious shoot ‘em up action that’s seamlessly lobbed together with divergent paths and an onslaught of intense bosses – yes, Contra: Hard Corps is an utterly fantastic game, one of the best on the Genesis. This is a review for Technocop, which is anything but.

Yet this dubious use of electricity was something of a hit upon its initial release for the generally exceptional Commodore Amiga, and as such I’m willing to concede that the original program may not have boasted a degree of ineptness that Electronic Arts might well have envied back in the day. We console gamers also tended to be a rather more demanding lot, often insisting upon such baubles as “music” and “play control”, but the Genesis version did at least boast a warning label on its cover to alert all to the fact that it’s “not suggested for children under twelve” – because not only do adorable little urchins have a tendency to get caught in the crossfire, but every time you gun down an enemy, he literally EXPLODES into a tiny shower of gore, the disembodied limbs continuing to twitch helplessly about on the floor before lying still in their newly-made ruddy pool! Of course, this is depicted with graphics that would look right at home on the Master System, so in this instance “disturbing” is displaced by “unintentionally hilarious.”

The enemy AI, however, isn’t amusing in the least; these unkempt scoundrels, often in pairs, simply run up to you and proceed to bash away with their whips and clubs, rapidly draining your health despite your awkward attempts to pump them full of lead. As if being double-teamed wasn’t cheap enough, it often takes several shots to down each of your attackers, but after firing ten rounds you’ll have to stop and reload while the undaunted survivors continue to whittle away your life; you can take out pretty much anyone with a single strike using your secondary weapon, the snare gun, but it’s ponderously slow and can only hold one net at a time. Of course, it’s not as if all your enemies offer an inglorious death under the lash – many appear out of nowhere to throw knives at you from afar! Predictably enough, this is every bit as frustrating since your character won’t react until a few seconds after you instruct him to crouch, and meanwhile someone’s probably assaulting you from up close anyway. With basic enemies like these, you know the bosses must be something else!

Take your initial quarry, an obese slob who proceeds to shove a barrel of toxic waste towards our hero – and then does absolutely nothing(!), making not even the slightest of movements to defend himself; this furious, thumb-pounding first encounter is soon trumped by what appears to be a man wearing a magician’s top hat who teleports about the screen not once, not twice, but thrice . . . and then promptly vanishes in a puff of smoke, never to return. And let’s not neglect sensuous level three, a greasy thug who straddles his long, hard cannon as it slowly discharges sticky globs of ooze . . . which really isn’t anywhere near as cool as it sounds. Really. Naturally I could list more of these formidable guardians, but that would require slogging through the game again – and damn it, a man’s got to know his limitations!

But wait! Each of these side-scrolling massacres is preceded by a thrilling racing segment in which you speed towards the next crime scene in your tricked-out sports car, blasting all the other motorists into dust thanks to its payload of highly volatile basketballs . . . except that your sleek ride just sort of floats across the road when it’s not spinning out at the slightest provocation, so, um . . . never mind.

It’s still a preferable fate to the alternative, because all sixteen levels suffer from a pronounced case of déjà vu due to their featuring the same dreary hallways over and over and over again, a seemingly endless multitude of apartment doors, sleazy women-types sitting outside, and corpses with knives protruding from their chests. Oh, how I envy them; the operative word here is “labyrinthine”, particularly considering that you pass by virtually the exact same scenery every three seconds. Ever accompanied by the inexorable sound of one’s thumping gait, you’ll discover increasingly complicated mazes wound throughout randomly placed walls, elevators that bridge the copious number of stories, and gaping holes in the floor that are scattered all over the place, at times situated over one other so that when you fall in one, you actually plummet all the way down to the basement. You can forget about navigating these deceptively treacherous pitfalls without a potent dose of random luck; our hero’s jumping is particularly unwieldy, causing him to uncontrollably soar a mile into the horizon with an appropriately goofy “hyurk!”

Despite this, the strict time limits are wont to give you just enough of a count to track down the main suspect’s hiding place – provided you had a sense of where you were going, but the “radar” is incredibly vague, which isn’t much help in such a convoluted waste. It’s all too common an occurrence to wander aimlessly about in search of this boss, occasionally stopping to expend a few lives on the chronically similar goons, only to run afoul of the timer and subsequently find yourself engaging in a hopeless search for the door you started from. And then you’ll head for the next level, only to wonder if you were unknowingly caught in an inverted warp zone as you suffer through well night identical surroundings and struggle with the same frustrating enemies.

Perhaps the game’s most considerate feature, then, is that you don’t even need to achieve success in order to progress; fail to eradicate or even locate the stage’s boss and the game will still chug merrily along, even to the point of awarding you (theoretically) cool new gear for your car as if you’d actually deigned to pretend this was a real game instead of making yourself a tasty sandwich while loitering by the entrance for three minutes. It’s almost as if the programmers realized the sum of their efforts was barely playable and that no one would ever persevere to the end; feeble developers, I salute your painful honesty.

“Hyurk!”

The short-lived novelty of exploding perps aside, there’s honestly little else of interest to merit this barely mitigated failure a second glance – except for the heated encounter in which our arresting emerald-haired protagonist must do battle with a towering heap of sentient refuse, her ferocious barrage of swift-sailing needles piercing this fangorious creature’s bulk as it emerges from the poisonous murk to unleash searing beam attacks that must be quickly avoided by way of her graceful, soaring leaps! No, wait . . . that’s some sort of cross between Shinobi III and El Viento.

Hold on, that would be awesome!

Just imagine it, evading scantily clad ninja girls and deadly axe-swinging midgets while swinging to and fro above pits of glowing toxic ooze . . . scampering up the heights of the Empire State Building while being relentlessly beset upon by vampiric winged brains . . . or hanging ten on your rocket-powered surfboard looking to thrash ludicrously pixelated octopuses with your Peruvian ninjutsu magic! Oh man, just thinking about it gives me the shivers.

That’s not to say that Technocop can’t make me shiver, but it’s not quite the same.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/22/04