JYDGE Reviews

I've played a LOT of Neon Chrome and I love JYDGE. It's set in the same universe, and call it a standalone expansion if you will but it plays and flows very differently and the changes are all good. If you have played Neon Chrome you will get the basic skeleton of what is going on, but the way you tackle the game and the way you progress is totally different. It does have replayability in the sense there are medals for each mission and because it's not procedurally generated you can improve on your attempt each time or just plan to focus on one of the harder medals and get the rest later. Medals are awarded for things like "save all hostages" or "get in and out in 20 seconds". Medals are used to unlock implants for the JYDGE and upgrades for the Gavel(his gun) and the more you unlock the more creative you can get with your loadout. After I beat ACT 1 it unlocked a hardcore mode that I could replay the missions with for more medals and more upgrades. So that's what I did, beat the first act and then started on it again and quite happily. You could really specialise for a particular medal if you liked. Because there are no random elements, and along with your character, the gun has multiple perk slots and the volume and variety of perks, I can see great things ahead. The music is excellent, more dynamic and aggressive, which really helps when you are able to walk through most of the props you had to shoot or melee in Neon Chrome. Windows? Just walk through them. Thinner walls? just walk through them. I'm entirely delighted with JYDGE. If you liked Neon Chrome this is different enough to stand on it's own. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

If you've played this studio's games before, their signature shooter gimmicks are all over it, reused once again. But one of Jydge's greatest strengths is that it allows you to opt-in to different character builds based on what you've unlocked through progression, making it stand out from their prior work quite well. The progression choices combine nicely with a Hotline Miami-style take on the game's levels. Jydge's levels are not nearly as binary / trial-and-error driven, but are similarly brief, brutal, and quick to retry. The game incentivizes you to experiment with all the different upgrades by providing challenges in each level which unlock "Medals," the primary gating progression mechanic. Each level has multiple different challenges, really forcing you to experiment with different builds to earn more. I saw a negative review that viewed this as a bad thing -- if it was a big story RPG I'd understand that more. But this is an action game, I don't mind mastering all the options. If you like action shooter mechanics and playing with action game character builds, Jydge is just a silly good time. It's not going to blow your mind, but each medal offers some amount of challenge and they are fun to earn, and there's a lot of them. Because each of the challenges for the levels are different, it's even fun replaying the same levels multiple times, as you tackle them in different ways. So there's quite a bit of playtime here. What more can you ask for? I haven't played the co-op yet, which is probably why I bought the game in the first place, but I'm often looking for a dumb action game to wind down with. If you find yourself in the same boat, I think you'll like Jydge.

[i]Hotline Miami[/i] does [i]Deus Ex[/i]. You play the titular Jydge (pronounced "judge" with a dystopian Y), a dreadful robotic cop sent in to rescue hostages, defuse bombs, and slaughter gang members across nineteen stages. On its surface, it's a twin stick shooter based around completing various objectives in seemingly small levels. But boy, is there more than a surface here. There are thirty-five player modifications, fourteen weapons, thirty weapon mods, and fifteen secondary weapons you can unlock. Each level seems small, but they're dense with intersecting paths, multiple entrances, pockets of darkness, and destructible walls and barriers. All of this means that there's an absurd range of possible solutions to every problem. A single mission could be solved by walking through the front door guns blazing, or stealthily sniping from the shadows, or hacking through a back way, or converting enemies to fight for you, or [i]literally becoming a giant[/i] and running through walls, turning enemies into pulp with a swing of your Gavel. (Gavyl?) [i]JYDGE[/i] valiantly condenses the complex interplay of an immersive sim into an arcadey shooter. Of course, this is still made by 10tons, with all the bullet dodging and ultraviolence that entails. But [i]JYDGE[/i] aspires to be something deeper than that, which it tries to convey through objectives and setups that force you to constantly retool your Jydge for the task at hand. But that's where it gets controversial. At its core, this is a game about replaying. Every level has four difficulties with increasingly harder layouts and their own set of three objectives (one primary, two secondary). Each objective in a level gives a medal, and medals are needed to unlock more levels and upgrades. It's often not possible to get both secondary objectives in one playthrough, so many times a level will need to be beaten twice per difficulty if you want to get everything. Curiously, there are certain elements in a level that carry over between playthroughs; doors that are locked need a key, but will stay open once they're unlocked, and there are certain named enemies that function like minibosses, but they'll stay dead once they're killed. Often, these will get in the way of completing secondary objectives, so you'll sometimes need to unlock those doors and kill those enemies in an earlier playthrough to achieve the objective in a later replay. What this all means is that if you want the full experience of the game, you'll be diving into the same levels over and over to complete them differently each time. There isn't too much of this if you just want to see the end of the game, and there's a newly-added option to greatly reduce the number of medals needed to get to the end if you're seriously allergic to replaying. But it should also be said that [i]JYDGE[/i]'s soul is in experimenting and discovery, and the changing objectives and layouts are designed to push you out of your comfort zone to see the depths that the game's design offers. Among twin stick shooters, [i]JYDGE[/i] is in a class of its own. Its design boldly tries to swing with the greats while still keeping the roots where it came from. If you want a twitchy shooter where you also flex your brain, or if you just want a break from your typical roguelike-shooter/high-score-chaser/whatever, this is well worth your time.

The introduction to the game was a bit of a cold shower. Nothing prepares you to the small size of the maps. But this is because it isn't a straight-up shooter: in a sort of derivative, twisted [url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/248610/Door_Kickers/]Door Kickers[/url], you are to be the law and the order, and do some serious judicial work by killing the right targets. When, after a couple of maps, the structure of the game starts to make sense, it becomes a joy to play. Maps grow larger and larger, and soon enough, the chaos' nuances cover all of the Neon Chromic palette. There are persistent aspects to the way you shape the maps (I won't say more), which makes little sense narratively, but entice you to try and progress one step at a time when you are a bit low on the power curve. The recycling of visual assets since Neon Chrome is obvious. Well, I don't really care. The gun mechanics are so good: if 10tons is to be to shooters what [url=http://store.steampowered.com/search/?developer=BrainGoodGames]BrainGoodGames[/url] has become for streamlined tactical puzzles, that is very fine with me!

This is a fantastic action game. I absoultely love the dystopian/Judge Dredd feel of the game. The action makes you feel like a real badass. I also liked the strategic nature of dispatching each level. The best feature by far is the ability to customize and modify your Jydge and his Gavel. This adds a very indepth and intricate layer of strategy. Levels play totally differently depending on the layout you choose. Also, you not only get tons of weapons, but they all level up so there's a ridiculous number of ways to play. Another fine point is the level of replay. There are a lot of levels with many ways to play from stealth assassin to guns blazing. This is a great game and I totally recommend it!

There's a great game somewhere in here, but the designers made it mostly inaccessible. To unlock the story missions, you have to repeat previous missions with more and more precise perfection. It's like they made tedium a requirement to be able to play this game, and they really didn't have to.

I picked this up on a lark, when it was on sale. I'm glad I did! It is amazingly fun, and I'd advise it to anyone looking for something good, fun, and challenging. A lot of people are comparing this to Judge Dredd. Fluff-wise, it's kinda fair, since your character is "Judge, Jury, Executioner" and all that fun stuff, but crunch-wise, it feels closer to the old Crusader games. There are a few things that have turned people off to the game, and I'll go over them here: The progression is locked behind "medals"; level-by-level achievements for completing the levels in certain ways, like not killing any civilians, not breaking anything (ASTOUNDINGLY hard), or not being spotted. My advice if you are trying to do this would be to go after the medals oe at a time. Some of them have a nice synergy where you can get more than one in a single run-through easy. Others, not so much. The cyberware that helps with one medal won't help much on another. A second sticking point is that there's not a whole lot of story. The overarching plot basically boiling down to "get rid of this one particular gang" and the story mostly being told as a radio voiceover played with a spinning graphic image. Yeah, if this were a bigger budget game from a bigger studio, there would probably be a huge, expensive cutscene showing gangers breaking into places and causing mayhem or whatnot, but IMO the resources were better put to making the game more fun. Plus, those cutscenes are usually only watched once, then skipped entirely every other time (the radio messages are skippable, FYI. No unskppable cutscenes in this game). So if you're looking for a fun, easy in-and-out game, then give it a try! You might be pleasantly surprised.

When I saw that the creators of Neon Chrome made this, I was really excited and picked it up, but after playing it a bit, I became very dejected and disappointed. My issue with the game is that progression is tied in with earning "medals" for completing specific objectives per level, and the medal curve becomes so steep to progress it becomes tedious to keep playing trying to get every little thing done the way the game wants it done. What I really LOVED about Neon Chrome is the freedom and flexibility to complete levels the way you wanted to, such as clearing the whole floor or running right to the elevator to avoid death, and the way random chance created a new experience every time. Jydge is the opposite experience, where each level plays out the same way, and you're forced to learn it and replay it as many times as it takes you to get enough medals to progress with either gear or the story itself. Although I really enjoyed the setting and aesthetic of the game, I find the way progression functions to make the game a tedious experience.

A fun "play it your way" game that lets you either sneak, run and gun or set an optimal tactical loadout for each stage. ..that is untill you hit the wall of "you need more medals to progress" and you are FORCED into doing a 20 second run, not get spotted or never getting hurt. The first hour of this game was great :) ..but then the developer forced me to play in a way that I neither enjoy or am good at. Further punishing players with a prominently displayed "civilians died", yet blocking progess unless you do those 20 second runs. Good game for allowing various playstyles in the start. But I will not recommend it: 1. Permanent death counter demotivational 2. Forced into playstyles that are not enjoyable 3. Relies heavily on reflexes, baring people with poor motor skills (I can play the start of the game, but when it forces me into hard mode by requiring medals I just meet frustration) Has the potential to be a good game, but forces players into hard mode to progress. I had 1 hour of fun and 1 hour of "I hate this game" (I have 27 medals and am on lvl 8, having completed all the hard mode goals of level 1,2,4. Meaning that I have not tried 10 levels yet. Also gear progression is locked by medals, so the game may get easier by changing equipment later) Update: I now have 41 medals, need 51 to progress. I am out of fun missions/medals again, but need 10 more to enter the next area. I had 30 minutes of fun and 40 minutes of frustration & annoyance. Yes better stealth tools come later, but the sneak mode is still annoying: 5 minutes of gameplay wiped when you get spotted. For the forced speedruns: An into scene playing each and every time. If progression was not locked this would be a good game: Encouraging different playstyles. Right now it is forcing me into a grind of things that I do not like. ..even though I have finished the mission objective in all areas.

[b]Alright, so another title from 10Tons that is uncomfortably close to [i]Neon Chrome[/i].[/b] This one is quite good. Now to be clear it is not as good as [i]Neon Chrome[/i], but that's ok. [i]Neon Chrome[/i] has nearly infinite replayability due to proc gen, and [i]JYDGE[/i] has premade levels (I will not use the term 'hand crafted'). The rogueish factor in [i]Neon Chrome[/i] also gave it serious hooks for addicting gameplay. But yeah, [i]JYDGE[/i] is solid and does its own thing pretty well. I like the mission structure and the tons of really cool unlockables and gear. 10Tons has shown they are really good at coming up with cool and novel mechanics, and now they have also shown us that they understand how to hide grind. That's a fantastic skill to have when developing games. But on a very serious note - and moving forward - please, no more [i]Neon Chrome[/i] look-alikes. I [i]know[/i] that [i]Time Recoil[/i] had its own angle and so does [i]JYDGE[/i], but the whole 'feel' begins to wear thin at some point. [b]Pros:[/b] +Great functional unlockables and gear to customize your dude +There is some pretty great subtle humor +I like the mission structure +The price point is right [b]Cons:[/b] -I think this would have done better with proc gen levels; the premade levels aren't anything super special (have the levels generate once per save, so mission 1 is always the same BUT was randomly generated that once) -I want those feels back from last summer when I was super addicted to [i]Neon Chrome[/i], and both [i]JYDGE[/i] and [i]Time Recoil[/i] sort of tease with that but don't deliver on that level (and that's ok, but it's true) [b]Get [i]Neon Chrome[/i] first, but then get [i]JYDGE[/i].[/b]