Virocop (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
52Virocop is a run and gun platform action game, developed by Graftgold, and released in OCS and AGA in 1995. It features console quality graphics, fast action, and lots of bullet cartridges flying around in real time. But is this virus/alien combat game really as good as it looks? Let's find out.
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Recorded:
Edit Started: 15 Oct 2024
Narrated: 18 Oct 2024
Narration Editing started 20 Oct, completed 10 Nov 2024
Uploaded: 12 Nov 2024
V3
This is another game which I always wanted to try, but never had the motivation until it came up in the Superleague in Oct 2024. 13 players took part, and with varying degrees of success. Only one player managed to get beyond the Cannon Copper levels, so this gives an indication of the difficulty. This was my 5th play (I think). With the others shutting down my machine mid-play. So this was recorded during the first week of the round, and narrated, and then I went to Benidorm for the final two weeks, where I continued work on the half finished final edit.
Editing the narration was started on my desktop, and then I took it with me on my laptop to Spain. I managed to edit maybe 25mins of footage over 3 different evenings, but still had 20mins to edit when I got back home on the 6th of November. Editing the narration takes the longest time to do, by far, but there are too many things in it which annoy me. With this one, I wanted to keep a nice general volume level, so I removed every peak in the audio manually; which happened several times in a sentence, and trying to do this on my very slow laptop in Spain was very difficult. The whole second section of the narration was louder due to losing my voice, and the last section seemed like I was shouting. So these got changed in the final edit to level the volume a bit more. I noticed that some of the narration is ahead of the footage by half a second, and this affects all of the later levels, but it was now too late to correct this as the audio ducking was already in place - and it didn't seem to spoil anything.
Almost on the final day of the compo, I reached the X-mas Cannon Copper level (World 3-2), which would have been nice to show off near Christmas when this might go out. But I didn't want to be distracted by recording it live, so I didn't. (I still got my butt handed to me anyway).
I only found out that there is a lives counter in the game by watching my own footage, and noticing the dots under the energy battery symbol. Thats why I may mention that there are no lives in the game during narration, as I only noticed this fairly recently. I always wondered what those dots were for.
Danscore:
Virocop came out in 1995, when most nerds switched to Win95, and therefore have never heard if it. Perhaps this is a shame, because what there is on offer can be quite addictive, once the player discovers how to play it. Memorising the levels is not critical, but it really helps to save lives on the early levels, and take out memorised enemies safely. Sometimes there is a trick to avoid damage, and some players reported to getting past the game bosses without a scratch. So practice makes perfect. But I found the constant back-tracking to pick up health was often annoying, and taking critical damage can be achieved in all kinds of ways. For example, on the Cannon Copper levels (World 3), the player can die just from falling into the water. This is very easy to do, given the fact that all of the World 3 levels require to player to rush along piers over the sea, to face battleships, as part of the mission for each level. The controls in the shop seems silly, when there was no need to hold down buttons and directions, in order to do simple things like 'buy' and 'swap'.
Despite the volumes of annoyances, I found the difficulty curve was the biggest issue. Considering only a handful of Superleague players saw World 3, it probably means they will never see the later levels in the game. The game never feels beatable from start to finish, unless you've already grinded away and mastered it, bit by bit. Even then, most of the weapons are weak and restrictive, so there is very little incentive to save up for most of them from World 3 onwards. The player almost never gets to enjoy running and gunning, and it's always Stick and Move, which gets repetitive. And don't get me started on the moving platforms! Overall, very addictive early on, and could have been a Chaos Engine challenger with the right fire power. Good graphics and suitable music, but the game goes on and on for 4 hours according to the longplay, which feels too long for this kind of action platformer. I give it 7 out of 10.