"The best Judge Dredd game ever" is hardly a high bar, let's not kid ourselves. It's a fine game, but even at its time of release way back when, it could have done far better.
Run a farm, befriend the locals, spank some slimes, fix a community centre and run the Amazon analogue out of town. What's not to like? The day cycle is, frankly, a bit short for my liking, and partly results in some unnecessary pressures, but for the most part, it's all rather chill.
* The writing is awful. * The VA feels like people were pulled off the street for a fiver. * The combat is a jankfest. * Music is forgettable. * The "hacking" might as well inflict literal brain damage. * The graphics are hideous, choppy and a legitimate detriment to gameplay, coupled with wonky animation that wouldn't look out of place in a sloppy shareware game from the early 2000s. Goodness knows, the UI feels the same. And there's a really unnecessary scene in which a doctor in an essential quest tries to rape the protagonist. So edgy /s Uninstalled after a couple of days.
This game is certainly trying to be WipEout (why else would they give it a vaguely similar name), and... it fails. There's no challenge. Only annoyances. You can finish the grand prix in less than a day, and with an evening of grinding, you can buy everything for the final two achievements. But do you really want to? There's no point. Winning a race is almost a non-issue. Most of them, you blast off so far ahead it might as well be a one-person race. Buy missiles and you can almost always pick off all your opponents within a few seconds of crossing the start line, because they can kill your target in one hit and none of the opponents seem to have the necessary Armor Mk II upgrade to survive it. I'd say the music is a bit of a banger if the entire sound system wasn't a mess. At first, you can hear the game announce every pickup you collect and then it just gives up, even after a restart, and the music can't decide whether to be loud or near-silent Sometimes you hear random explosions that you're pretty sure are on the other side of the course, but they're the same volume as if you had exploded. Some of the power-ups can't justify their existence. Autopilot is painfully pointless. Speaking of bugs and glitches, yeah, there's a few. Barriers sometimes decide they don't want to be destroyed (and when they do, they just... vanish). Sometimes ramps like to just randomly pathfind your ship into a right angle to smack against a wall. you can't use any power-ups at all while you're airborne. One glitch almost cost me a race by just not rendering a part of the track until I was bouncing off the wall and into a mine. And I haven't even mentioned some on the bad geometry yet. Love to see missing faces where the camera should see them... oh, wait. Yeah, it's "free", but people paid for this and now it's only "free" because it's a glorified ad for the threequel. Problem is, it's a bad one.
Because this is the game for you! Strobing cut scenes! Nauseating camera movements! A character so bland and poorly-acted, an enema would be preferable to listening to this generic shaved-headed Grunty McKillGuy, who is supposedly some crack agent but can't exercise a little opsec! Come for that and stay for the utter nonsense that passes for a story, the complete inability to work out where any damage is coming from, the game's sadistic habit of spawning enemies right behind you or in places you had no idea had rooms there) and foes that somehow survive a grenade to the face. Don't expect the faddy bullet time mechanic to help you, either. The tutorial neglects to bring it up and even when you do realise it exists, it's functionally useless unless you like standing around waiting for it to recharge once a millenium.
When you slobs get around to updating this game to the remastered version on here, I'll maybe consider giving it a better score.
