Stalker was supposed to have tremendous AI and an open world where the creatures would interact with each other even when you weren't around, blah, blah, blah. But, of course, it was released years late, and little of what was promised made it into the game. The graphics were average when released, and unimpressive today. Shadows are horrid, head-bob exagerrated and vomit-inducing, and the game freezes briefly when it loads from disk. A lot. Zoning also causes AIs to respawn in areas you cleared out. Weapons degrade and break after a very unrealistic number of shots, and you need to fire a lot because the guns have rubber barrels; you can point an assault rifle at someone a few feet away, empty the magazine, and every bullet misses them. So you'll be looking for guns and ammo. A lot. Your inventory is small, so you'll be running across the map to sell junk. A lot. Many missions disappear from your journal after a while, so you'll be running half-way across the map, through multiple zone loadings, to get more missions. A lot. You'll get used to crashing. A lot. You'll get used to making multiple save files, because, when your most recent save fails to load, you'll be looking for a save that wasn't corrupted... a lot. The setting is an interesting one, and, with enough mods, it's still a competent--if buggy and crashy--game for its era, but a pale reflection of what it was supposed to be.
Shogo is simply great fun, and manages to combine good old fashioned FPS action -- with the added benefit that it switches between mech and foot-based combat so that you at least appear to get two for the price of one -- with humor and a different kind of plot-line; I can hardly imagine Gordon Freeman having to save a woman's pet cat from the wackos who want to eat it, or trying to decide whether or not to admit to his ex-girlrfiend that he's now dating her sister... though perhaps Half-Life would have kept my attention for longer if he had. Really I can't say much more than that; while the graphics are dated, the AI is old and the anime-based plot is somewhat bizarre, I think I've played through this game more times than any other FPS I own because it never gets boring.
Let's be blunt about this: Dredd vs Death is a bad game, where the implementation flaws -- for example, the civilians you have to rescue from zombies repeatedly get stuck behind garbage cans, or being sent into a prison full of vampires with only a pistol and a few rounds where you hope that AI judges die so you can loot their ammo -- are so blatant that you often miss the vast design flaws. The whole concept of taking the decades-long Judge Dredd mythos and turning it into a tedious zombie-killing game, while making the Dark Judges look about as scary as a pack of girl guides is a huge missed opportunity. Yet, at the same time, it's also rather fun. The first part where you're arresting perps in Mega-City goes to show just what the game could have been like if they hadn't copped out for the sake of making it simple enough to run on consoles, and just seeing some of the Mega-City locations and characters -- even if you're repeatedly shooting zombies with poor AI -- is still an entertaining experience. Beyond that, some of the mini-games are better than the levels in the main game story. Overall it's hard to recommend to those who aren't Judge Dredd fans, but for $5 it's a cheap few hours of gaming and there probably won't be another Judge Dredd game for some time. P.S. Why I can't I type space into the review window? It ignores my space bar so I had to type this in another program and cut-and-paste.
