Judge Dredd

"Go get Demolition Man instead."

Judge Dredd was another underrated Stallone movie, ok, maybe is was a disaster as a real movie, and those costumes they had were ridiculous as hell, but it was great brainless entertainment, with all, it wasn’t a big success, too bad, I’ll never understand critics. Anyway, Acclaim acquired the license to make the video game, and they have done a decent action game, similar to Demolition Man (that is why I am going to compare them a lot), and while not as good, it is still an above the average Acclaim game.

Graphically Judge Dredd is excellent, the game has 24 megabytes and that can be easily seen in every single scenario, full of detail and with wonderful effects. The characters movements are splendid, the way the move is perfectly made because it is very fluid and realistic. The music, although there is not enough of it, also has a lot of quality and it is very adequate with that dark feel it has. Technically Judge Dredd is an excellent game and well surpasses Demolition Man.

The gameplay is kind of similar to Demolition Man but worse. Let’s begin with the controls, they are not bad at all, but they get messy sometimes, because when we are shooting, if we need to dodge we have to stop shooting, dodge, and then start shooting again (and the same happens when we want to stand up again), and is it is a bit complicated to kill enemies this way, and even more when they are as aggressive as they are in this game, as I said before this is the same problem Demolition Man had but here it is worse. As Mr. Stallone is a “judge” here (really?) we have the possibility to “judge” (no kidding!) some of the enemies instead of killing them, but by doing this you take a lot of risks (remember that the enemies are a real pain sometimes, very aggressive), and while I am not completely sure, probably you will only earn points by doing this, so kill them and that’s it, they are nothing but dirty scum after all.

Then one of the biggest flaws comes, unlike what happened with Demolition Man, in this game we have scenario objectives, and most of the time they are always the same, that is, destroying supply boxes and dispatching all the enemies on the stage, something that ends up being boring, specially when you managed to get to the last part of an scenario just to find that you haven’t killed all the enemies or that there is something left to be done.

The last thing that almost ruined this game is the lack of variety and mostly the difficulty, this game sure is hard, as I said before a lot of times the enemies are really hard to kill and some stages have truly deadly traps that will dispatch us in no time. Then the scenarios tend to be very repetitive and they look very similar all the way, so a lot of times you will probably end up lost in some stages, because sometimes it is a bit hard to see where to go or what to do, the ladders for example as always hard to identify, they are just a very thin bar than can easily be overlooked, and the same happens with a lot more ways to advance, so sometimes you will find yourself wandering around without knowing what to do, and that it frustrating sometimes.

As a result:
Judge Dredd is a nice action game, but I could have been better, and I think Demolition Man was way better, more varied, entertaining, and while it has the same control problems than this one, the gameplay was overall much better, but this one is not bad if you are a fan of Stallone, or the movie, or the comic, I guess.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/28/04