Judge Dredd: Dredd VS Death

"Judge Judy has nothing on Dredd!!"

So I'm reviewing a Judge Dredd game. To tell you the truth I would never of known who Judge Dredd is if it wasn't for that crappy movie made however many years ago that starred the Italian Stallion Sylvester Stallone. The good thing here is that you don't have to know who Dredd is to enjoy this budget shooter based on the comic book and not the movie thankfully. Lets get to the basics to see if this game is guilty of wasting my precious time.

STORY:

I have never read any of the comic books so I wasn't familiar with any of these characters just to let you know. I'll start off by saying that the story isn't very good. Basically all that is going on is that the 4 Judges known as the Dark Judges have been released from their crystals that Judge Dredd had captured them in before and are looking for bodies to occupy their souls. Being the strongest and most feared law enforcer in the city it is your duty to stop these fiends before they destroy everything. This is really all there is to say about the story without spoiling little tid bits you'll discover while playing the game. You'll go on a hunt to put an end to Judge Death, Judge Fire, Judge Fear, and Judge Mortis and there you go. I didn't play the game for the story though so lets move on.

GRAPHICS:

Being a budget title you can't really expect the game to have wonderful graphics. The graphics work and are sometimes not bad at all but don't expect a Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or even Halo 2 because you'll be disappointed. The character models are pretty bad for the humans but are a little better when you get to the creatures. Judge Dredd himself in my opinion looks terrible but luckily it's a first person game so you can't see your ugly self. There is some lighting and shadowing effects that look decent at times but the environments still look for the most part ugly. You'll notice right off when you shoot your first victim that there is a ton of blood in the game. For me this was the saving feature for the graphics. Blood will shoot out of your enemies and splatter quite nicely on the surrounding area. The special effects in the game aren't very good but they're also not terribly bad either. All the guns look nice when you're holding them but not so much when you shoot them. Grenades are also terrible looking when they explode but it's forgivable. Not eye candy but it's also not an eye sore so lets leave it at that.

SOUND:

I promise this is the last of the bad stuff. The sound in the game also isn't very good either. The voice overs aren't very good with the exception of maybe Dredd. Judge Dredd sounds like a badass which is good but all the other characters sound pretty stupid and annoying. Hostages never shut up if you don't have them follow you and people you arrest never shut up when you arrest them. It gets pretty annoying after a while but you can phase it out pretty easily. The creatures you fight don't sound all that good and the bosses sound at times kind of ridiculous as well. The guns I guess weren't all that bad but I'm not a gun specialist so I wouldn't know. Lastly, the music wouldn't make people run out to get the album if there was one. Some of the music is alright but the rest just doesn't fit the game very well. Lets get to the good stuff now.

FEATURES:

-2-player split-screen co-op
-4-player split-screen multiplayer
-Arcade Mode and Battle Mode
-Up to 12 bots in a multiplayer match
-Customizable controls except for the thumbsticks
-HDTV 480p support along with In-game Dolby Digital
-Unlockable characters for multiplayer and unlockable Arcade modes

GAMEPLAY:

You saw all the great features the game has to offer now lets talk about the gameplay. The controls are as good as you make them since you can customize them to your liking. You have 10 different weapons at your disposal but you can only hold 2 of them at once like the Halo series. Your main weapon is the Lawgiver which is my favorite weapon in the game and is one of the cooler weapons in any fps game. The Lawgiver holds 6 different types of ammo (Standard Execution, Armour Piercing, Ricochet, Incendiary, Hi-Ex, and Heat Seekers) that you can switch to on the fly.

There isn't a big variety of enemies you fight so the gameplay can get a bit repetitive but there's enough to keep you trigger happy throughout the game. The gameplay is pure run and gun action that is non-stop. You'll fight off gangs that you can choose to arrest and give a sentence to (which is decided for you), zombies, and vampires. Like I said above you have the option to arrest human enemies or even regular civilians and give them a sentence. Some of the sentences are funny especially the ones given to unexpecting citizens. This feature is fun but it is sometimes hard to read the sentence given out since it only stays on screen for a couple of seconds.

You're given a variety of objectives when you start the mission and some missions have a secondary objective that can be done. Some objectives have you kill all the creatures in the area or arrest all the thugs in the area and others might have you rescue hostages scattered throughout the area. That said, rescuing hostages is my least favorite part of the game because you have to have them follow you to a certain point and some of them can be extremely dumb and get stuck behind or even lost. The other problem with this is that the hostages die in one hit so if you are in battle while they're following you then you better do all you can to protect them because some creatures will go right after them and if they die you fail the mission most of the time. Luckily there isn't a whole lot of these types of missions in the game and the rest of the missions you can basically just depend on shooting your way out of the level which is fun as hell.

At the completion of the mission you get ranked on how well you did and this depends on how many objectives you completed, how many times you've died, and just how well you've performed. The better the ranking the more unlockables you get. You'll always unlock an Arcade Mode with the completion of a level but sometimes in order to unlock certain characters in mulitplayer you have to get a perfect rank or just a certain rank in a certain level.

You have the choice to play through the story mode with a friend cooperatively which is a very welcome feature. It works kind of like Halo where if you die you respawn but you do so at the last checkpoint. This can make the game pretty easy because unless both players die at the same time or you mess up on a objective you'll never have to totally restart at a checkpoint or level, still the co-op feature works really well and is a ton of fun. There are 10 multiplayer modes to choose from and up to 4 players can play split-screen or 12 bots can be put into a match. There is no system link unfortunately but the number of multiplayer features makes up for that.

The games difficulty varies throughout the levels. I found myself dying a lot in some levels and not at all in others. The story mode really isn't very hard but the arcade modes can be mind numbing difficult at times. The bots also seem to be super human because sometimes it's like you can pump them full of lead and they won't drop but then they can drop you fairly easily.

JURISDICTION:

All in all this is a very solid game and well worth the $20 price tag. There were some disappointments such as the way they handled the boss fights and the stupidity of the bots sometimes but noting to really ruin the game. Don't judge the game by it's cover.....because it's pretty goofy looking in my opinion:P

7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/03/05