A solid movie tie-in. Don't be afraid to give it a look.
One thing everyone agrees on is that the film isn't very faithful to the comic book. To be honest, I haven't read too much Judge Dredd (though I wish more opportunities would arise), but even I'm aware of that. However, I can say that the game is more faithful to the comic than the movie.
How so? First of all, Dredd never takes off his helmet... ever. Even Sylvester Stallone acknowledged that the movie makers were idiots for doing that so often. Second, Rob Schneider actually does not appear as comic relief. Third, there's some occasionaly vague referances to the comics. Okay, so the movie also had that third one, but whatever.
Judge Dredd for the SNES plays as (surprise surprise) a 16-bit sidescroller. As Judge Dredd you walk around stages shooting bad guys and completing objectives. The game tells you your objective at the start of every stage, but who has time for that? If you want an update on your objective, you need to access one of the many computer terminals placed throughout the stages. They can also tell you about your accuracy and how many bad guys you've either killed or arrested, but that's not necessary. Reading some of these terminals is required to advance in the stage. But, in a bizarre twist, you actually have to blow up some of these terminals rather than read them.
Just using the face buttons on the controller you can shoot, kick, jump, and arrest incapacitated bad guys. The R and L buttons cycle the many ammo types for your Lawgiver pistol. Use the D-pad to walk, double tap to run. Nothing too crazy here. Don't expect any mysterious button combinations that are necessary to advance like in Batman Forever.
While the Lawgiver pistol has many different ammo types, the only ones worth using are the grenades, rockets, and standard ammunition. There are bounce rounds, and ones that do God knows what (seriously, some of these don't seem to do anything), but none of those are worth your time. The enemies can take some punishment, but your standard ammo fires as quickly as you can press so they still go down rather quickly.
Most of the enemies have guns themselves (and look alot like Duke Nukem for some unknown reason) so your natural reaction is to shoot them. Occasionally you'll come across a dude with a knife, but I often find myself spending so much time shooting that I foget all about the melee. This usually results in me taking several stabs and being JUDGED GAME OVER. Yes, the game says that. There's some boss enemies (including the nearly impossible ABC warriors) and dudes possessed by the Dark Judges (there's one of those comic referances I mentioned) who take a bit more damage, but that's about it.
The stage designs are a mixed bag. Some stages ask you to look around and find switches while others just want you to move forward. The ones where you explore usually don't require much exploration anyway, but the few that do are incredibly large and confusing. The linear stages are fairly easy, but occasionally you'll come to a dead end where you're expected to know that you need to blow down a wall. Remember that if you ever plan on playing this.
There's also one stage where you get to pilot the Lawmaster jet bike. If you screw up once, the stage ends and you automatically advance to the next stage. Such a shame since it's actually very fun. The stage lasts as long as you can make it and kicking bad guys off their bikes never gets old.
The graphics in the game are pretty good. The sprites are all very large and have alot of detail. All of the characters are animated well, with the notable exception of Mean Machine Angel. There's a fair amount of detail in the stages. However, most of the backgrounds look a bit bland. This is especially odd since the first stage has plenty of background detail. It's like the designers thought they'd suck you in with the fist stage and you'd be completely unable to resist playing. Oh yeah, there's also those nice looking explosion sprites, but what 16-bit game doesn't have those?
And of course, the audio. The music in the game isn't all that interesting. I don't exactly know what it's supposed to sound like, but its certainly unique. Like any SNES game all of the audio has that odd muffled sound to it, but it still does it's job. I've never played it, but the Genesis version's music sounds much better. Not much to say about the sound effects other than they're there.
So overall, it's not bad. The game can keep your interest for an afternoon, and as far as movie tie-ins go, it's okay. There's some unnecessary features like the arresting and most of the ammo types, and not all of the stages are pretty to look at, but the game is solid.