Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death is a surprisingly fun little diversion, emphasis on little. The 11 chapters go by rather quickly even on the hardest difficulty and spending extra time and effort to maximize your arrest record. Arcade mode does add some time, but with the exception of two, those twelve levels don't take very long to beat with a maximum rating either.
Playing on Hard, I earned Judge Dredd ranking on all story missions and all but one Arcade level in one day; not bad for $6, but a pretty weak value next to most of GOG's offerings. Still, it had the potential to earn a four, but gets dragged down by a few moderately irritating bugs.
VISUALS:
This is a budget game, and it shows. The engine isn't bad, but the models are low-poly and flat-textured. That said, it looks fine, and the fire and gas effects are plentiful, if not particularly advanced. Environments are a bit sterile, but there are setting-appropriate if simple decorations, the cityscape skybox is nice, and varied lighting provides a bit of atmosphere.
STORY/ACTING:
Amusing enough. I don't know the comics, but the theme is clear, the various criminal charges are often funny, and flavor comments from Dredd, perps, and bystanders are varied enough to be engaging. Story is fairly standard superhero fare, and the whole game is silly enough that weak voice acting in some of the dramatic scenes doesn't matter at all.
DIFFICULTY:
As noted at the top, this is an easy game. On Hard, you can lose most of a health bar to a zombie charge, but there's not much risk of that unless you're trying to save ammo (which is never necessary) and beat them up in hallways where you can't dodge. Most levels have a couple Med-judges to heal you and give you a medpack, which automatically fills your health bar once it empties. For enemies with guns, you have a shield that can take a couple pistol hits and recharges after a few seconds.
The attempt at providing challenge comes in the form of "rankings" - at the end of the level, your kills, secondary objectives, and arrests are tallied, and you unlock arcade levels and multiplayer characters (or cheats, in arcade levels) depending on how well you did. However, this just requires that you play properly - arrest everyone and you'll make Dredd every time. Thanks to your shield, it's not too hard to camp in cover and slowly shoot guns out of perps' hands so they'll surrender. For those perps that refuse to surrender or gang wars where they're shooting each other and depriving you of arrests, you have gas grenades. However, beware - the ranking is based mostly on total sentence time, NOT number of arrests; the one level I had to repeat was the mall one, where I managed to take out all the perps' guns before any of them fired a shot, resulting in short sentences. Make sure they fire once first, so you can give 'em life (100 years) for assault of a judge. When you see Cult Guards / Assassins, take them out and surrounding cultists generally give up.
Another tip to farm sentence time: some vagrants, most scrawlers, and some civilians will refuse arrest if challenged from the front, but submit from behind; each refusal adds five years until the fourth, which gives them life for resisting arrest. Also, anyone on their knees (due to gas grenade) can be arrested, even formerly innocent civilians, and the innocent always resist arrest! Abuse the system for fun, profit, and Judge Dredd ranking! :-P
You get credit for arrests even if they die after they're cuffed (most useful in the Judge Fire level - fire barely hurts you, so you can run around issuing traffic and smoking citations before too many are fried by your fireball-tossing foe). Finally, when you're out of 'nades, death cultists who won't surrender will stop picking up weapons once you shoot several out of their hands, and if you leave for a bit then watch from a distance, they eventually get scared and surrender.
Outside of the story level where I didn't abuse the law enough, I only had to repeat two arcade levels, both of which are timed zombie kills. "Night Shift" merely required a change in strategy (keep charging upstairs and using ammo quickly - the grenade launcher respawns when you're down to 2 shots), and "Visiting Hours" is the only one I haven't reached Dredd ranking; protecting the civvies is easy enough, but I haven't yet gotten enough vampires to spawn while doing so. This raises an point of mild irritation about rankings: while arrests and undead kills drive your rankings in story mode, arcade levels aren't made clear. Generally, if it's timed, you want to complete the objective as quickly as possible, while if it's "survive/protect for n minutes", you want to max your kills. (There's an added twist to "Public Relations" that isn't clear until you finish it - technically it makes the level harder, but it actually makes getting max ranking easier, if only I'd known!)
One irritation that shows up any time you're escorting is that ally pathing is really bad - if it's not a straight shot to you, they are prone to falling off of stairs and ramps, or getting stuck on corners; when there's a rescue zone the last one can get caught behind the fronzen rescued ones, forcing you to load a save and try again, and when the last rescue zone is also your exit zone, you might leave the level before they step in, losing you a secondary objective.
CONTROLS & GAMEPLAY:
Standard WASD+grenade+action, with an extra action for "challenge" (do this so you can arrest perps or random bystanders guilty of owning hamsters without a license) - it works well enough, and everything is responsive; any vaguely recent machine should handle max settings smoothly. Jump is a bit flaky, especially combined with crouch - time it wrong and you'll end up doing not much at all, with a slight delay before you can try again. Fortunately, it's rarely necessary. There aren't many objects lying about, but it's still possible to get temporarily stuck on geometry, particularly in tunnel doorways or near railings; this can break your stride when dodging vampires, which is upsetting.
"Action" is used both for arrest and for switching weapon - text onscreen tells you what you'll do, but when approaching a perp it's all too easy to accidentally swap your secondary with his pistol, or to arrest him instead of swapping (which makes you stand and freeze for about a second). Also, in arcade levels, you swap your current weapon, not just the secondary - this is confusing until you get the hang of it.
Your primary gun has a wide array of modes, all of which pull from the same clips (with varying per-shot costs). This would have been a lot cooler if I'd used anything other than armor-piercing. The burst-capable standard is pointless because and AP isn't actually just anti-armor, it's a more powerful, accurate single shot. Hi-ex rounds pack punch but are more trouble than they're worth for the most part, and incendiary is fun but a pointless waste of ammo. Ricochet is similar, and the only time I used heat-seeking was to see if it would track undead once they were on fire (it does).
LEVELS, STRATEGY, and OTHER ELEMENTS:
My favorite level is the final, a desolate outdoor wasteland with surprise-spawning enemies, flame geysers scattered about to keep things interesting, and a loaded Lawrod right at the beginning. You have way more than enough ammo to spend the whole level sniping, even if you miss a lot. My least favorite is the one where you rescue a Tek Judge, because he got trapped in a room by unarrestable vagrants twice and stuck on geometry three times, requiring a reload every time (shooting innocents gets a big law-meter penalty; I had 5111 years of sentence but I like my clean record, ya know?).
Be aware that you move fastest running forward - you back up at about vampire speed, but can easily outrun them if you turn around. When using the Lawrod, always turn and run when you hear spawns, then snipe at your leisure.
When short on ammo, anything can be beaten senseless. 2 hits for normal undead, 3 for the fat ones, 15 for the ludicrously obese, 3 for vampires, 4 for skeletons. At close range, undead can hurt you when they roar, with no noticable attack animation, so either get behind them or attack at the end of their 5-swipe charge (run up at the third swipe, hit, and back off). Vampires have terrible aim, so you can circle around and hit them when they pause after a leap or stand and roar - this is pretty safe with up to three in a wide hallway, but don't get stuck on any corners.
If you're feeling cheap, all monsters have some sort of range limit - past a certain point they either turn around and go home or get stuck and stand still while you beat on them. This counts against the game because in some hallways, you'll end up hitting this point accidentally when trying to beat them up, which takes out the fun.
A few more tips: steer the heck clear of the civvy shotgun (Stump); slow ROF, 4-shot clip, long reload, and low power except at point blank combine into "you should be 4-tapping AP from your primary", which you can do 8 times on a clip and at any range. The Lawrod has a large clip and fires AP-equivalents in accurate 3-shot bursts or has an instakill sniper mode which is tremendous fun outdoors. The only round you need on the Lawgiver is AP (32/clip), and there are usually dead judges lying about to give you 5 clips each. The Las Rifle charges shots when you hold fire: a half-charged shot to the head or fully-charged blast to the chest will kill a Guard/Assassin. It zooms, has a big clip and any level where you find one has Assassins to drop more, so have a ball. If you're low on primary ammo and can't find a rifle, the civvy pistol is accurate and good for disarming perps. The Lawrod is lovely but sniper mode makes disarming harder - you can usually shoot the gun or arm, but with the Lawrod arm shots are lethal. The grenade launcher is lovely when you don't need arrests, but look out - some vampires seem to resist it really well. Finally, reloading can be interrupted by melee attacking - the resulting partial clip is plenty for an emergency, particularly with the machine gun.
THE VERDICT:
I AM the Law!
I did enjoy the game, but there's not much here, and it's not much of a challenge either. Worth a few bucks, a fine buy on special, but it just lacks the usual GOG value. If it weren't for the glitches, it might have earned a 4, but as it stands, it gets a respectable 3. [I try to use a balanced scale; 3 is just fine but nothing special, leaving room for 4 & 5 to distinguish good and great.]
