Police Week – Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death

Luke-warm reviews? An unpersuasive demo? Competition from the likes of FS9, Call of Duty, IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles, and Rise of Nations? I can’t recall why I didn’t play this futuristic FPS in its year of release: 2003. As an avid WASDist who was rarely far from a copy of 2000 AD during the Eighties, I should have found it irresistible.

My long-overdue rendezvous with this 22-year-old genre footnote began promisingly. After a brief tutorial I was sent out into a suitably megalopolitan Mega-City One to round-up placard wavers and scrawlers. Discovering, by chance, that I could arrest the apparently innocent as well as the patently guilty (you slap on the cuffs the and the game concocts a charge) put a grin on my face as did the sight of amusing billboards like this one…

As the satirical humour (along with the art, storytelling, and violence, natch) was a big part of the appeal of Judge Dredd for teenage me, I was gratified to find traces of it in the early stages of Rebellion’s FPS. Unfortunately, the further I got, the scarcer those traces became, and, within an hour, JDDVD had acquired a munce-like blandness the source material, even at its weakest, never possessed.

The game’s slide into genericism is hastened by the mindless zombies and vampires that dominate two of the first four missions, and by the forgettable story that halfheartedly explains their presence. Another contributory factor is the devs’ failure to fully exploit arguably JDDVD’s most interesting and distinctive feature, the LawMeter.

Nestling in the lower right-hand corner of the screen is a gauge that measures your professionalism. Do things by the book and the needle rises. Harm unarmed or surrendered perps, or innocent bystanders, and it descends. Break the rules when the LawMeter is at zero and you’re considered rogue. The Special Judicial Squad show up with guns blazing, effectively ending the game.

If innocent citizens were more common in missions – if you ever found yourself chasing perps though busy thoroughfares, and firefighting in crowded spaces – the LawMeter mechanism might have been influential and helped JDDVD escape mediocrity.

Because civilians are actually pretty rare, and most foes open fire the second they notice you, I found myself approaching missions in exactly the same way I’d approach missions in a standard Doom-like. Why bother to challenge, disarm (possible with well-aimed shots) and arrest, when holding the trigger down is much simpler, and the only reward for a high LawMeter reading at the close of an outing is a better score and a few extra multiplayer unlocks?

I wonder what a studio like Monolith would have done with the Judge Dredd licence. Witty, weird, and packed with incidental colour, the marvelous No-One Lives Forever has many of the qualities I reckon a good Judge Dredd FPS should possess.

Although JDDVD isn’t the Mega-City One judge sim I was hoping for, as a retro FPS regularly on sale for under a quid, it’s not to be sniffed at. Putting thematic concerns to one side, punchy boomsticks (there are shotgun, rifle, and MG equivalents, as well as a Lawgiver capable of firing four different ammo types), bone-crunching melee, and a plethora of botmatch modes, potentially compensate for the unremarkable AI and the short (around six hours, apparently) story duration.

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