A death cult has caught the attention of the Judges by plotting to release the Dark Judges - Mortis, Fire, Fear and Death from containment so they can basically wipe out all of Earths sins (through genocide!).
You must then locate each Dark Judge and kick the shit out of them - Dredd style, whilst dispatching or arresting any cultists or gangsters along they way.

Before I go any further - This game is RUBBISH.
The thing is though, I really enjoy it! It's terrible in most aspects, but I just love playing it. It's the only crap game I've ever loved. I'll explain why it has moved me this way in the sections below.

I would say fans of Judge Dredd... best not though unless you don't mind Dredd being a little on the weedy side. The Dark Judges are quite well realized though (except Death who looks like an ugly Casper the ghost).
Otherwise, fans of FPS or futuristic shooter might enjoy this. It's not too likely though.

There are a decent amount of levels and a lot of them are rather big and full of enemies. Of course, it takes place in Mega City One which is actually quite well realized in this game. It's only when you come to the edge of the scenery you realize it's a bit shoddy as the developers seem to have just erased the floor in a lot of places to stop you going further. hmm. The giant skyscrapers and occasional space traffic overhead are good though, and the areas you explore at ground level are all suitably scummy, setting an atmosphere for crime-busting.
Crime-busting is actually not too bad here too as you can command perps and civilians alike using the R2 button, one press and a pretty good 'Get on yer knees' or 'Halt lawbreaker' is snarled in a gravelly tone causing any civilian at least to kneel down. Criminals might take a bit of brutal persuasion before they submit - you can shoot guns out of their hands, or just shoot their leg a bit, or one of their mates and they will assume the position, providing they are minor perps and not high cultists you find later in the story who will just keep shooting until one of you is dead. Once they are on their knees, you press another button to arrest them and upon arrest, a list of the person/criminal's details comes up on the screen for a moment such as their name, crime and sentance. Some of the crimes are hilarious, like 'Possesion of a goldfish without a licence'.
It's not all just crims though, you also get the 'privilege' (smell the sarcasm) to take down zombies, vampires and skeletons. I'll explain why they were a big mistake in the section below.
The Lawgiver - the Judges' trusty handgun is a great weapon, and the weapon you recieve from the start of the game. With a flick of the D-pad you can change the bullet type from normal fire to armour-piercing, to explosive rounds and even to incendiary. The latter is quite useful if a little brutal, firing a glob of napalm towards a target and often resulting in screams of agony. The rest of the weapons however are slightly shit. You can gun-butt fools by pressing Square though, which is effective if you can time it right.
If you commit enough crimes yourself (killing civilians, shooting arrested criminals, using the incendiary rounds on minor perps), the law will step in and send an endless army of Judges to take you down. There is a law-meter in your H.U.D that tells you how you're faring in these terms, and a higher law meter will go towards a good ranking at the end of each level. You will be ranked on time taken, enemies dispatched, average law rate etc. The rankings are 'Rookie' 'Street Judge' 'Senior Judge' and 'Judge Dredd'. It's not massively hard to get a Judge Dredd rating on normal mode.
There is an easy, normal and difficult mode. I've only done the normal mode because diffcult mode would be a touch too far with the extremely poor aiming the game provides...
There is an Arcade and Battle mode available from the main menu - the Arcade mode being not too bad - the Battle mode being dull.
In arcade mode you have to do certain little challenges such as eliminate 40 robots in a given time period, or survive in a vampire infested factory until the timer runs out. Depending what ranking you get for each challenge can open up a cheat which is useable in the story mode. This is quite a good addition and there is are lots of fun cheats which actually enhance gameplay such as Touch of Mortis, where upon melee attacking anything, they die instantly in a fizz of green smoke and burn away until they're just a skeleton.

(Cracks knuckles - takes a deep breath)
O.k.- The Judges' character design is laughable. Dredd looks almost malnourished and gangly with skinny legs and a bulging crotch. The other Judges are much the same. To add to that, there are about 5 civilian character models, making the city look like a clone sanctuary.
The enemies are pretty stupid. I mean the human enemies, not the vampires. the vampires are possibly one of the worst videogame foes on the PS2. The human baddies - petty criminals and cultists are fairly dumb. They will just stand and wait if you take cover, immediately pumping lead into you when you pop out and occasionally they will run up to you and just stop, looking right past you, pointing their weapon. You first encounter the vampires a couple of sections into the game, and there is no explanation for them. And the term vampire has never been so poorly implemented before in the history of... vampires. They're bald, naked grey/lilac humanoid animals that scamper erratically around on all fours and attack you with a dull crouching swipe attack. That's not a vampire. It does have the prominent canines though.. so I guess it must be. Additionally, their A.I is so all over the place that they can be almost impossible to shoot with the atrocious aiming system which doesn't help you in any way. There are zombies too which come in two boring types - normal and skinny, and they have a swipe attack too but watch out - They're poisonous! (Wtf?)
Also there are skeletons in there too but they're not even worth a mention.
The ragdoll physics when you kill someone - this isn't really much of a problem as I quite like ragdoll physics, but when YOU die, it just looks wrong. Big, tough Dredd shouldn't go all bendy and flimsy - even in death. Plus, you will probably die a lot thanks to the vampires which sometimes attack in groups of up to five strong which is fucking ridiculous considering that they are faster and stronger than you, and are hugely irritating to try and shoot down.
The weaponry is pretty poor also, which is a shame because you kind of need them to be better for certain parts of the game. The shotguns are a little weak and it feels like you are firing a peashooter. You eventually get laser guns - a laser pistol which is quite good but very scarce, and a laser rifle which is atrocious when combined with the difficult do-it-yourself aiming in the game. About one in ten shots might just connect with whatever you're trying to kill, and even then it's not all that powerful. There are a couple of other guns such as a railgun thing which is alright, but you'll just have to make do with what you get. Use the Lawgiver wherever possible, but note that you will probably not get any ammo for it as only Judges drop Lawgiver ammo, and they tend to use other guns a lot of the time.
And that's another thing: There's the odd Judge or two in some levels that provide a bit of back-up, but they get killed so quickly you could be mistaken for thinking they are in fact made of cardboard, or something equally weak. Two hits and they're ragdolling across the floor like wet noodles.
Some of the environments are linear and samey, and the fairly bland graphics don't do much to help this.
Boss fights aren't too bad, if quite confusing at times, but it's the final boss that will make you sigh loudly when you run past it and activate the three things needed to kill it. Sorry if that spoiled things for you, but just being near this end boss will undoubtably spoil things for you anyway. In fact the whole final level is poor if I'm honest.
A couple of challenges in the Arcade mode are impossible, I would say to a point of broken, which is very annoying. There is one challenge in particular in which you must protect and keep alive a group of civilians from swarms of constantly spawning vampires. This simply isn't possible! The civilians just stand there while about four vampires come towards you from different directions, going for you and them alike. It takes about one hit from a vampire to kill a civvy so you're essentially buggered as the time limit is a few minutes, and there are up to over 5 vampires any any time due to them rapidly respawning. The aiming system obviously fails you because they are too quick and unpredictable to kill efficiantly, so that's it. You can't do this challenge.
Battle mode is a big arena-based shoot-everything-that-moves type deathmatch which can be played with up to four people, or by yourself. Neither is worth trying as the aiming, which brings the whole game down a large notch, makes killing all these fast moving enemies far too difficult for you to really want to bother. Plus, you'll be hard-done by to find up to three friends who actually want to play this piece of shit deathmatch with you anyway, let alone one.

There's actually surprisingly more, but I'll leave it there.

Strangely, play it again! Despite my venomous views above, I find it really fun to play because it's such a bad game. I genuinely like the levels and the 'Get on yer knees' button and the side-missions which I failed to mention above. Plus, even though it's so poorly implemented, it's still Judge Dredd - who is my favourite comic-cook hero, and there is actually quite a good atmosphere throughout the game which makes you feel like you're fighting for justice in Mega City One.
If you can get over all the glaring errors in the game then you might have a good time with it.

Extremely frustrated at times, but compelled to keep playing anyway.

Rebellion, who made the well-known Aliens Vs Predator game for the PC back in the mid-nineties. This game is unfortunately a massive step down for Rebellion, as AVP was an absolute gem. (I've not played it but I've heard good things)

You might be mad about 2000AD or Judge Dredd and just want to drokk the grud out of some perps whilst feeling kind-of badass about it. You may alternatively enjoy crap games.

It actually makes the movie with Sylvester Stallone look good in comparison.

I would give this game an overall 2, but I just like it so much! It's probably not quite as bad as I've made it out to be, but I can't really judge (haw haw) just how good it is with these conflicting feelings.
For some it may be higher, for some, lower.
I'd say on a scale of One to Ten, it's a 6.
Therefore it must be a 3 out of 5 overall. Even though it's piss-poor in many areas, it makes up for it by having a good atmosphere and a decent amount of stuff to do.

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Created Jun 09, 2010 at 8:25am • Submit your own review...