Judge Dredd

"Surprisingly good movie tie-in."

You know, many of the movie and TV tie-in games for the SNES were actually pretty good. Tiny Toon Adventures, True Lies, Star Trek: TNG, and also Judge Dredd. This particular game is a lot more involved than you might think.

Anyway, in this game, you're Judge Dredd, and you have to go through about ten long stages (some with two or three separate parts). In each stage, you fight enemies, collect ammunition, and fulfill other mission objectives. Each level is sort of like a 2-D maze. You can climb ladders, ride elevators, explore different corners of the map, backtrack, and blow up walls to advance. The backtracking occurs due to the various mission objectives. For example, you may need to find several different computer terminals and access each one to activate various doors. So you'll likely be scouring each stage from corner to corner, looking for that last computer terminal, crate of explosives, or barrel of toxic waste.

Sometimes this can get a little annoying, but overall the stages are quite well-designed. They're large and complex enough so the game doesn't seem too easy, but most of the time they don't take the cheap way out in hiding the mission objectives. A couple of times, you have to figure out that you have to walk through a certain wall, but usually it's more a matter of figuring out the layout of the map. Basically, the game is much more restrictive than Super Metroid, but much more complex than, say, Contra or something.

Along the way, you have to fight many different types of criminals. You can shoot them with your gun, or use martial arts. The gun has an infinite supply of basic ammo, but there is a lot of variety in the form of many different kinds of special ammo, like grenades, firebombs, armor-piercing missiles, or even these green bubble things that you use to capture ghost enemies. You can also get extra points if you "arrest" a criminal instead of killing him. You do this by shooting him a few times to make him surrender. Some criminals are vulnerable to the basic ammo, but usually you need to use a special kind of ammo if you want to make an arrest. Some will just never surrender.

There's some variety among the enemies, as well. Most of them just walk back and forth and use their fists or guns, but some climb ladders and some can fly, some are these robotic cars that require precise timing to blow up, and then there's also these giant robots that can take off half your health and shoot homing missiles. For that, you need a little more finesse. So there is enough variation in the action to keep it interesting.

Additionally, the story sometimes has an effect on the gameplay. After the second stage, your character is convicted of a crime he didn't commit and sent into exile. As a result, you start the third stage with only your basic weapons, without all the special ammo you accumulated in the first two stages. This forces you to be cautious in the third stage, but it also feels rewarding when you reach the fourth stage, and find a giant cache of special ammo to make up for what you lost.

So, there's enough challenge, the stages are generally well-designed, and the game is fun to play. The music is not overwhelmingly great, but not bad for a B-grade movie tie-in. The problems really only start to appear in the second half. First, the Janus Lab stage is exhaustingly long. While that is par for the course in some sense, it ends with a really cheap boss fight. You have to shoot the boss to make him drop special one-of-a-kind ammo that can't be found anywhere else, and then you hit him with that ammo, which has very limited range. In the meantime, he flies around (literally, he has an antigrav unit) spraying you with bullets. This is way too frustrating.

After that, it's back to normal, except the game sort of starts repeating its ideas. The chemical plant stage is very similar to the penal colony stage (even the enemies are the same), which was already long. The dank colour scheme makes the stage feel even more tedious. Some tilesets from earlier levels get reused. You can tell they were running out of ideas.

The last stage is radically different from all the earlier ones -- you get thrown into an alternate dimension where you battle the ghost enemies. In some sense, it's kind of a relief to see something new there. But definitely, the length of the game is a bit wearisome. Especially since there's no save feature. There are passwords, but you need to find special "password disk" items in the levels to get the passwords. The password disks are not usually in plain sight, so you really need to look carefully for them. That can add to the frustration.

So, not perfect, but fun. The first half is the best, so this is a good game to play casually. I usually just play up to the Janus Lab stage. Basically, a quality late-SNES action game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/09

Game Release: Judge Dredd (US, 10/26/95)