Sylvester Stallone's acting is even better than this game...
Developer Rebellion was responsible for Aliens vs. Predator, a highly successful shooter that spawned an even better sequel. With that information alone, I was confident they could pull something off with the Judge Dredd license that wouldn’t be as awful as the Sylvester Stallone flick. Alas, from the title screen alone, which displayed the year as 2003, I knew I was going to be in for a treat. After playing through the game, I can be certain that even if this game were released two years ago, it would still be a horrible playing experience.
The game’s premise would have you think it’s a just another day in the 2000 A.D. universe. Judge Dredd is conducting business as usual, apprehending and arresting suspects for various offenses like, “Illegal possession of a hamster without a permit,” and “Smoking in public.” While chasing after one suspect, Dredd stumbles upon a vampire. From this point on, the game’s story takes a spiraling nose dive into absurdity where you’ll encounter vampires, zombies, and an assortment of gun-toting baddies.
It would be wrong to say that I didn’t enjoy Judge Dredd; in fact, I enjoyed it thoroughly, but for all the wrong reasons. There was a certain fun factor in playing a game this bad. Not to mention the sheer challenge in seeing how far you could get with an interface devoid of any user-friendliness. There are navigation points telling you where to go next but they don’t always show up. It’s frustrating trying to find where exactly you have to go since levels are often cluttered with useless areas that you can explore. They don’t have any enemies, power-ups, or ammunition, which brings into question their very reason for being in the game. If that wasn’t confusing enough, mission objectives aren’t displayed on the screen until after you complete them. This caused more than one instance of running around a level wondering what the hell I supposed to do. There is a menu that displays your objectives adjacent to the pause screen but it’s very well hidden; nothing in the game or the pause screen indicated that it existed and I found it by sheer accident.
If you’re able to find your objectives and blast through the five hour campaign, you’ll find Judge Dredd doesn’t really offer much in terms of gameplay. The game consists mainly of going from room to room, shooting everything in sight. The levels are linear, having no alternate routes, throwing single waves of enemies in your path, leaving you with an experience similar to the Serious Sam games, but without the innovation or fun. Aside from the annihilation of anything and everything, you’ll occasionally have an escort mission, made all the more difficult with the game’s clumsy AI. Friendly AI will sometimes get stuck in crevices or around corners making you have to restart from a checkpoint. Enemies seem to have two settings—attack and surrender. If you shoot enough of their buddies, some of the bad guys will give up, enabling you to cuff them. For baddies of the undead variety, they’ll attack you from any angle, even if it means getting stuck on a fixture trying to run at you. It’s comical seeing what the game actually tries to do, it will make you laugh, but you’ll soon discover that it’s not intentional.
For everything that goes wrong in the game, one of the few parts that shines through are the weapons. There are a good variety of guns including the standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, two variants of an energy weapon, and what can only be described as the standard judge auto-pistol. This gun is the mainstay of the game and will be the backbone of your arsenal. This gun has several different types of alternate fire including incendiary rounds, explosive, rapid-fire, and ricochet. It’s a shame that most of these ammo types don’t have practical uses in the game. You may find yourself sticking to one type of firing mode since one seems just as good as the next.
One thing you’ll quickly notice is that there’s not nearly enough ammunition spread throughout the levels. The majority of your enemies will be vampires and zombies, none of which carry extra magazines. Occasionally you’ll run out of ammo, leaving you with nothing but your bare fists. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as hearing bone-crunching punches land against the face of an angry blood-sucker. But even that falls victim to Judge Dredd’s under-production and severe lack of polish. The problem isn’t that your attacks will fail, it’s that you are too vulnerable getting in close to enemies. Judge Dredd uses the Halo system with rechargeable shields. After one or two hits you’ll be zombie food on the ground, having to restart from the nearest checkpoint.
Another interesting quirk in the game is what I affectionally call, the “Judge-o-Meter.” As a Judge, you’re expected to carry out laws and arrest guilty citizens instead of shooting them on site. If you fail to cuff surrendering bad guys, your rank as a judge will go lower. When it reaches zero, you are in dereliction of duty and are targeted to be eliminated by other Judges. Even enhancing this aspect of the game would have made it more fun, but it seems more like a gimmick if anything.
The repetitive gameplay, short single-player, and ammunition shortages all combine to make Judge Dredd an awful playing experience. None of them, however, hold a candle to the graphics. The level design in Judge Dredd is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. The different rooms and alleys seem way too large for the size of the characters and suffer from a “small man in big land,” problem. If that weren’t enough, many of the levels look and feel the same. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between a prison, a warehouse, and the back alleys of Mega City One. Textures for the levels and characters may make your eyes bleed. Civilians and enemies seem to be based off the same three or four character models and your fellow Judges look like carbon copies of each other.
The sound, while not spectacular by any means, seems to be the high point in the presentation of Judge Dredd. The dialogue in the cut scenes isn’t anything worth mentioning but the weapon’s sounds were adequate. Shots are clear and vampires screech with the appropriate creepiness. Nothing in the sound department could help save this game though.
There are several types of multiplayer including deathmatch and split-screen co-op but why you would admit to your friends about owning this game is beyond me. An arcade mode also offers up a few survival and escort missions. Those missions play better than the actual single-player but those too are nothing original and seem directly ripped from games like Timesplitters 2.
I was optimistic when I first received Judge Dredd, the developers past work had warranted at least that much. The verdict is in and this game is guilty of several counts of ass-sucking. Despite the budget price tag, there is absolutely no reason to own, rent, or even want to play this game.