Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death

Starts out fun, and having a special gun able to fire six different types of round promises strategic depth. Then it all falls down. There's little to no reason to use the special rounds, there's no variety in the gameplay, no story to speak of. It's a lot like the first Doom: simply shoot anything that moves (well, *almost* anything).

A fun Arcade-type FPS. Fan of the comic or not, if you enjoy classic levels-structured genre representatives (where you don't have to fetch-quest-traverse huge sandbox areas, as in e.g. Stalker or Fallout 3) like Quake, Doom, Painkiller, Kingpin, Sin, Shogo, Requiem etc., you can't go much wrong with it. Can't compare quality-wise with the mentioned classics, but for what it is - a dated budget title - it looks decent. The Lawgiver main weapon lets you set vampires and zombies on fire, and then finish them off with Hi-Ex exploding bullets. Not even an effective tactic to be honest, but fun. Dry little one-liners here and there, the happy elevator music playing in a shopping mall, along with cheerful, practically anti-consumerist, announcements you hear while dealing headshots to advancing undead had me cracking up. The environments are colorful, and offer some cyberpunk atmosphere 2000-AD-style, albeit being low-tech-rendered tapestry; neon always looks cool though. Sure offers more of a Mega-City One feel than the tepid Dredd 3D movie (but that's not saying much in my opinion). The A.I. is just OK. Not a great game by any means. But fun budget-bullet-spraying. Not regretting my purchase at all.

This game is a well made 3D FPS of the comic. The engine & colours are comic in design & the voice acting on Dredd is spot on. It has LAN & MP modes as well as the moderate length SP game. If you like Dredd its worth the low asking price.

My recent interest in Judge Dredd and 2000AD in general led me to buy this game. For 6$ I thought...why not? A couple hours of entertainment for around the price of a movie ticket. Graphics are rather dated, but work well enough. Voice acting is good, sounded like everyone tried hard. Gunplay is fun, melee is a bit chunky when using something other than a Lawgiver (apparently Dredd doesn't like quick slaps), and it's short. The story mode, at least. You capture/kill the Dark Judges rather easily, and some levels are just a couple seconds long. Still, I had a good time, and that 6$ was well worth the entertainment I got out of this game. I've yet to try the other modes, and I'm fairly certain multiplayer is dead, but I can see myself beating the game every once in a while, especially when a lazy afternoon is enough for it.

The co-op experience seems to be out of favour in recent years, which is why I love good old games like this. We happened up Judge Dredd only because GOG brought it up before us, and my son has taken to some of the charatcers instantly (Dredd and Death in particular). I've even had to buy some of the Big Finish audio dramas! The game shares more in common with the Big Finish audios than with the original comic creation IMHO - both having smaller casts caused, presumably, by budgetary concerns (and of course it is a good OLD game - PCs were less capable back then). Having said which, not being flooded with ordinary citizens that you should ignore does not hurt the game at all as far as I can see. My only REAL complaint is the brevity of the game - it is only 11 levels long. vaguely similar games like the Dooms, Heretics and Quakes of this world are typically 3-4 times this size I beleive. I really wish there were add-on packs, third-party levels, or even a sequel - it's been fun to play this, and we'll be returning to the world of Heretic far too soon simply because we run out of Dredd fun :(