To be the best of the best; pounding the streets of the Big-Meg, Lawgiver in hand; meting out justice to perps. Can there be a more appealing fantasy? For fans of 2000AD’s most famous lawman, not likely. Sadly, there haven’t been many games that allow you to jump into the boots of Dredd, and of those precious few have been much more than playable, let alone good. It’s with this in mind that it can be safely said that Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death is easily the best of the bunch. By no means is it a good game in the sense that it’s better than mediocre. But it plays acceptably enough, has few game-breaking bugs, and most importantly it really feels like a Judge Dredd game, not just a generic FPS with a Judge Dredd texture pack. This is really the crux of the appeal of Dredd vs Death. Taken on its merits as a shooter, it’s mediocre at best, but it manages to become something more by virtue of its subject matter, a rare feat for a licensed game.
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| Damn protesters. The price of justice is freedom |
As a first person shooter, the game is competent. The movement is fairly fluid, there is a reasonable selection of guns and level design is functional if not inspired. This is all well and good. The game just feels to be lacking something, an x-factor if you will, to really make it a memorable experience. Take the weapons for instance. For one thing you’re limited to carrying two, which can really impair your ability to adjust to threats and can lead to instances of running out of ammunition as you only have two stacks of ammo to work with. Still, that design choice is at least understandable both in that the game comes from the post-Halo world of 2003 and because in the campaign you always have the Lawgiver with its six shot types. The main problem with the weapons lies in that they almost all feel pitiful, with the exceptions of the shotgun and the Lawgiver’s high-explosive mode. The main reasons for this are poor sound design, automatic weaponry in particular sounds subdued and sterile, and the fact that enemies tend toward being bullet-sponges, so shots seem to have little effect. Other niggles come in the form of long reload times which feel out of place with the rest of the shooting, and the time it takes for the lawgiver to change mode. It’s cool and adds some world flavour to hear the gun spout “Ricochet” (or whatever) when you change mode, but the time it sometimes takes for the gun to actually start working again can quickly get annoying, particularly when it leads to a death. This isn’t a totally uncommon occurrence either, due to the fact that Dredd generally takes so much damage per hit that he comes off as weak almost to the point of being immersion breaking; it’s jarring to see Dredd pulling amazing stunts in the cutscenes then being cut down by a shambling zombie in a couple of hits during gameplay.
The level design isn’t atrocious, it just lacks variety. Tight corridors packed with enemies are the order of the day. Not the greatest approach in the world given the long reload times and high damage per hit of the enemies. The few open areas of the game are rarely taken advantage of. They’re either cluttered with props or just lacking in enemies to fight. Nobody wanted Serious Sam from the game, but it would’ve been nice to have a good set piece gun battle in an open area. The only real ‘arena battle’ sequence comes almost at the end of the game and it goes on for far too long, as if the designers realised that they’d forgotten to put any in the rest of the game and tried to make up for it at the end. There is also a lack of difficulty progression in the overall design of the game, you’ve seen nigh-on all of the enemies by the halfway point, and they don’t get any harder or get deployed in higher concentrations as the game goes on. Even the boss battles with the Dark Judges are dull. They manage to be both very cheap and very easy at the same time. Cheap in that they just spam their single hugely-damaging attack and easy in that once you know what you’re doing you can just run rings around them. The whole experience is extremely anticlimactic.
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| God damnit Judge Fire, come out from back there. |
To further add to the experience, Dredd Vs Death also suffers from a few annoying bugs. It may be a stable game, but getting stuck in the geometry, which can be just as annoying as a crash, if only because when a game crashes you don’t spend five minutes fruitlessly trying to escape the floor/wall/crate you’re stuck in before having to load up a previous save, is an ever-present danger. On top of this, there are AI problems which can cause the same load-up blues. The most glaring is the AI’s uncanny ability to get stuck in doorways or behind furniture. It only seems to afflict characters following Dredd, so generally bosses and citizens to be escorted. It’s a common enough problem that I had to retry almost every objective requiring an NPC to follow, as they would invariably get stuck on something and be unable to go where they needed to be. The most annoying instance was in the Boss battle with Judge Fire. The fight involves using sprinklers to drive him through the building, but he kept getting stuck on chairs. So what should’ve been a simple fight took a few tries and a lot of rage. More amusing is a bug that gets NPCs stuck a few frames into their walking animation making it look like they’re ice-skating everywhere with one leg in the air. Again, this manifested during a boss fight, there’s nothing funnier than Judge Mortis skating around the emergency room without a care in the world.
As a game, Judge Dredd vs Death is clearly rather lacking. And yet, it’s somehow endearing. This may be the Dredd fanboy talking, but Mega City One is such an amazing setting and Dredd is such a cool character, even at his most two dimensional, that the game really benefits from its licence. The 1995 film proved that it is in fact possible to badly realise both Dredd and the Big Meg (things that should be impossible) and yet this game gets it right. There are concessions to the limitations of technology such as the same few character models being endlessly repeated, and some ill-advised product placement (Red Bull, really?), but all in all the city is very well depicted in all its brilliant, grotty, grimy, decadent, glory. NPC models may be limited and constantly repeated, but they just look right. They have an aesthetic that really doesn’t seem all that removed from the 2000AD source material. Dredd’s one liners too have a clipped, comic-book quality to them, even if they are delivered completely flatly by a voice actor that seems to want to be Jon St. John. Nevertheless, this combined with the other touches, like the Lawgiver’s fire modes, with its voice declaring the one selected, really add to immersion in the world.
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| No Comment. |
This apparent fixation with creating a good version of Dredd’s world even extends into gameplay through the arrest mechanic. All human NPCs are arrestable, with the crimes and sentence of the perp being displayed on screen, complimented with an appropriate little quip from Dredd. It’s a feature that, again, adds to quality of the adaption of the source material, especially as the comic points toward the laws of Mega-City One working to ensure that all citizens are technically guilty of something. Whilst alone it’s a good gameplay idea, it is sadly it is marred by another feature: the ‘Justice Meter’. The meter seems to exist to stop you mowing down civilians, as Game Over awaits if the meter gets too low. Irritatingly though, the game doesn’t seem to be able to decide when a citizen becomes a perp that can be killed with no consequences. Even after delivering a warning to and even being shot by an enemy, sometimes killing them will lower your justice meter. Still, the arrest mechanic really works within the gameplay to make Dredd vs Death feel like a true Dredd game and not just another shooter tarted up.
The main Story mode lasts about 5-6 hours maximum, with each completed mission unlocking a new ‘Arcade Mode’ stage. Arcade mode gives a set of challenges such as arresting X perps as quickly as possible or killing Y amount of enemies. The arcade stages provide interesting distractions but aren’t much more. They tend to reuse maps from the campaign and are either stupidly easy or far too difficult. The game also features an online or VS bots battle mode. This isn’t really worth writing home about as there aren’t any players online anymore and playing against bots is just like a less fun version of Arcade Mode.
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| The delights of arcade mode: shooting little robots. |
Overall, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death lives and dies on its licence. It’s currently $5.99 on GOG.com and how justified even that price is really comes down to if you want a Dredd game or just an FPS. As an FPS it’s going to scratch nobody’s itch: it’s too limited, too buggy and too unfulfilling. As a Dredd game though, it’s worth a look. Fans of the character and the setting may just get the mileage from those things to enjoy the story mode in spite of its mechanical issues.
Score (Sacrebleu il est nouveau!): As an FPS 5/10. As a Dredd Game: 7/10.
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