Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death Reviews

3/5 star

A true classic, would recommend anyone to get this when its on discount.

Solid classic shooter, gotta say. If you're a Dredd fan it's got a host of little references and nods to the comics. If you're not, it's a fairly decent shooter in and of itself. It has a few flaws and some jank as you'd expect, but nothing you'd not see in other games of the period. Best way to describe it is bootleg Timesplitters with the Dredd IP. Not a bad thing at all. Gameplay wise everything felt real tight to me. Some tweaks and the controls and sensitivity work fine. Not something you can say about some games from the period. Most of the guns sound good and have their niche. Some are not so great, being direct downgrades to better weapons in the same niche. Some are absolutely busted. Speaking of which. The star of the show is the Lawgiver, the Judges' signature pistol, and rightly so. If you had infinite ammo it's the only gun you'd need. The Lawgiver has a lot of fire modes, but generally standard, hi-ex and armour piercing are the only ones you need. You can do fun things, like set undead on fire and then use heat seeking when normally it would ignore them, ricochet bullets into a confined space to attempt to clear it, but other than that the other modes aren't that great. Nonetheless it feels great to use, and can deal with anything in the game in a few shots with proper trigger discipline. The devs in their wisdom, instead of nerfing and balancing the weapon, just reduced the ammo drops for the better weapons in later levels. It means when you do use the Lawgiver, or the Lawrod, or the Arbitrator shotgun, it feels damn good to do so. You might be stuck with the stump gun or the pistol for a while though, or that awkward charge-up laser carbine, or that plasma pistol that might as well be firing Nerf darts. Too many modern games balance weapons to the point they're boring. Not the case here. An Arbitrator shell will take the head off anything in the game bar a boss. The Lawrod if set up correctly will trivialise certain parts of the game. The Lawgiver just deletes anything, end of conversation. Campaign is fairly short. Really not a whole lot to it. Go from area to area, clear enemies, the occasional escort (of course there is) and a scripted boss mission. Thankfully a lot of the escort stuff is optional, but necessary to unlock stuff for multiplayer if that floats your boat. Campaign plot is standard Dredd - big bad messing with law and order and you gotta make him respect the badge. Dredd's there, Death's there, Anderson is there. Comic aficionados will spot things that will amuse them. When you arrest people you get a lot of easter eggs. Discworld fans will spot a reference to Ankh-Morpork's guard captain if they arrest enough people. One of the medic Judges hit me with a Monty Python reference. Dredd's spitting one liners the entire time. It's neat, it has that camp vibe, it has familiar faces, and you can arrest the morbidly obese for literal obstruction of justice. What more do you want from a Dredd game. The arcade mode feels like an afterthought though. Don't get me wrong, it has some creative scenarios, including one where you play a ganger. You have the option to loot a Lawgiver from a dead Judge and attempting to use it yields the appropriate result. Nonetheless, a lot of them just have enemies spawn directly on top of you, which makes things quite difficult. There's a lot of cheese you can use, combining the Lawgiver with specific spots on the map to get through them easily. But I stumbled on most of em, and most of the time you're just getting shot in the back if you're playing it straight on some arcade modes. So if you want 100%, you'll have to play dirty. For example, the mission where Judge Hershey has to survive a period of time with just the Lawgiver is not that easy played straight. They spawn behind you, shoot you in the back, big pain in the ass. So I holed up behind a bar, and set the enemies on fire with the incendiary mode. When they're on fire, they can't fire their weapon, and just try to reach you and set you on fire, but they can't, because you're behind the bar. And it takes a while to die from that, so when they're on fire, they aren't respawning and shooting you in the face, butt, back and balls. When they do die, they'll spawn and shoot at you, but if you're crouched they aren't hitting you, allowing you to pop up and just light them up again. Stuff like that has its charm in old games in my opinion. If you're the sort of person who can play classic shooters, embrace them warts and all, and not just watch 45 minute YouTube videos about them, this is one you can play. I liked it. If you like Judge Dredd, you'll like it more. If not, stick to your vicarious Civvie11 vids. A lot of you kids won't embrace the jank, and that's fine. Maybe they'll add Dredd to Fortnite down the line, if he's not in it already.

Pretty short game, only took me 4 hours to play through the campaign and I got lost a couple times. It was fun though, a good one to play if you get at a good price. I am finally dipping into my library I have been hording for years (instead of buying anything brand new) so its nice to cross another game off that list as well.

Good game and good film to dredd 2012 i enjoyed both but this game is absolutely classic nostalgia when iam in kindergarten and my parents buy some cool stuff and this game it was my miracle on my young age