Developer: Rebellion
Publisher: Rebellion
Rrp: £4.69 (Gog.com) and 5.59 (Steam)
Released: 17th October 2003
Available on: Steam and Gog.com
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 5 Hours
Long before Sylvester Stallone ever donned and made a mockery of the name, Judge Dredd was a property that most everyone knew. Spawning from the British comic 2000AD in the mid 1970’s, his legacy is still going strong despite two god awful movies. The question is, does this game live up to the name?
Judge Dredd Vs Death is a first person shooter where you take the role of the titular Judge Dredd. Its probably best to give a little background for those not in
the know. The game is set in a dystopian future where the planet has become a radioactive wasteland, the majority of the people live in Mega-Cities, in the case of this game it focuses primarily on Mega-City One. To keep the peace each city has Street Judges who act as law enforcement, judge, jury and executioner. The most famous (or infamous) of these is Judge Dredd.
Its not that often I talk about options menus, rarer still that I essentially start a review speaking on one, but in this case I can’t not talk about this. I like many other gamers on PC will immediately go to the graphics options and crank them up as far as I think my system will handle. Now considering the age of this game I had no doubts that my rig could handle it at full settings. Turns out the game disagrees, if I turn the anti-aliasing on at all the game crashes to the desktop.
I also recommend going through the controls too as there some… old fashioned ideas as to what buttons are used.
We all know FPS’s and the basic mechanics they generally use. Well Judge Dredd has something extra, the ‘Law Meter’. The law meter shows how well you’re doing as a Judge, the higher it is the better. However if it gets too low a special task force comes after you. I’ll talk a little later on about how the law meter rises and falls. Going back on to the subject of FPS mechanics, there are actually quite a few different types the most common of which are the Halo and the Call of Duty style. In this case the designers have opted to go for a more ‘Halo’ approach. Judge Dredd comes complete with a shield that regenerates if he goes
without being hit for a short period. Also, like Halo you can only carry two weapons at a time.
As I mentioned earlier the Judges of Mega city One act as judge, jury and executioner. As such, you can imagine that at some point you can and will arrest people. Well you’d be imagining correctly, of course you can’t just arrest anyone… actually you can but doing so lowers the law meter. Most of the time the ones you need to arrest are obvious, I mean, they tend to attack you so that’s a fairly big give away. There are others though who don’t just attack you on sight, such as some spray painters. You have no need to go after them but you can if you so wish. Doing so doesn’t have any direct influence on the story
campaign of the game other than to increase the rating you get at the level. This rating however does unlock more skins and levels to play with in the multiplayer which is dead so your only real choice is to play against the bots.
As much as I love the idea of the arresting system I wish it made more sense. One enemy shot me and when I arrested them they were given a sentence of four months in jail. Another didn’t shoot or resist arrest and was only spray
painting and what did they get? Life with no parole… seriously?! I know the the arrest sheets must be randomized but come one!
Generally the gunplay in this game is fine, the audio and visual feedback is sufficient enough that it doesn’t feel anemic. However, there are some things regarding the weapons that I cannot forgive. For example, if you zoom in using
the sniper rifle you can’t fully zoom back out without changing weapons, AND EVEN THEN the sniper rifle will immediately put you back into zoom mode as soon as its equipped.
Only carrying two weapons may seem quite limiting but the game mitigates this somewhat by having multiple ammunition types. Ricochet to bounce off walls and incendiary to cause damage over time just to name two. There is a flaw to this though, for starters the ammo is only available for certain weapons. But secondly the game uses the mouse wheel to scroll through the ammo types rather than being used to switch between the weapons.
As I played through the obvious flaws just kept piling up, a major one being that the game doesn’t respond to button inputs, specifically jumping. I press the
button and the vocalization of jumping occurs but not the actual jump. In some cases I’ve pressed the button four times before a jump actually happened. There also seems to be a small amount of lag with melee combat between the button input and the actual attack.
Several of the maps can often feel confusing and sprawling, and not in the good way as all the areas look very similar to one another. This isn’t helped by the
objectives occasionally being ‘arrest person x’ when you have no idea what they look like, so you end up arresting everyone.
The last thing I’ll mention (but its by no means the last issue I have) is the AI. I
found while playing through the game was that the enemy AI is a bit on the… simple side, regardless of which difficulty setting the game is on. This is an especially glaring issue when you consider that Unreal 2 and Call of Duty (the original one) were released in the same year and both had far superior AI.
If you tire of the story mode (and I’m sure you will because it gets really repetitive) you can always play the arcade mode, but to be honest its not worth playing as the AI is even worse than in the main game and its not really fun to actually play.
And no review of this game would be complete without at least mentioning the very blatant product placement in the game. One has to wonder how much Red Bull paid to have their companies brand all over this game, and more to the point, if the cost was actually worth it. I can say that having played this game my desire for a Red Bull has never been lower.
Honestly unless you’re a die hard Judge Dredd fan I can’t think of any reason to recommend this, in fact I’m pretty sure that a die hard fan would tell you not
to play it. Which is odd because this is definitely a game where having some knowledge of the property its based on is needed to gain any real enjoyment. A great example of this is in the very title of the game itself. To anyone who knows nothing of the franchise I would imagine that it sounds like you’d be fighting the Grim Reaper. This isn’t the case though, you fight against Judge Death, a Dark Judge who believes that all life is a crime. The game never explains any of this though, just expecting the player to just ‘know’ that.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Quake
Unreal 2: Awakening
Sin
