Copper is rather an odd looking policeman with a top
hat for a body and a pair of diddy little arms and tiny
legs on which he bounds along. Strange though he may
seem he's still an arm of the law and is out to solve
a crime. This is where the player comes into the game.
Topper has to be guided round a strange environment
to find vital clues so he can collar one of the seven
suspects of a crime.
Topper's
beat is a very weird one, with many different connected
rooms containing platforms and loads of 'orrible nasties
that sap his energy, shown by a diminishing bar. Should
the bar reach zero then Topper dies. Never fear though,
if the energy situation is rather dire then Topper can
return to the 'police station' room to replenish his
energy.
Dotted
around each of the rooms are safes, which Topper has
to collect. In eight of these safes lie the clues to
the crime along with the key to the jail. All these
need to be collected to allow Topper to complete the
game. Most of the safes sit in very awkward places and
Topper has to leap his way up from platform to platform,
in Thing on a Spring style, to reach them.
At
the bottom of the screen is an Impossible Mission
type radar scanner showing all the rooms and where you
are in relation to them. The map has three storeys and
each storey is linked by lifts. Well, they're not really
lifts, more like the buckets on chains that you find
on building sites. Jumping on these as they go past
takes a bit of practice -- if you miss one then you
plummet down the lift shaft and fall into the giant
boiler (which, not unnaturally, tends to be a fatal
manoeuvre). If you're going up, then also beware. There
are crushers awaiting a Topper who doesn't jump off
in time.
If
all the clues are collected then Topper can make his
way to the courtroom. Here a random riddle is printed
and using that and the clues which you have collected,
the suspect can be successfully apprehended and taken
to jail.
A nice feature about this game is that the seven different
clues and seven different suspects are randomly chosen
every game, so even if you solve it the next game could
be completely different.
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