“I AM THE LAW”
If you missed out on Sylvester Stallone screaming his lungs out for 1 hour 36 minutes in the overacted, cringey, silly comic book adaptation that is Judge Dredd, are you even a 90s guy? Though I admit that Karl Urban’s 2012 adaptation is a far, far better film, Stallone’s Judge Dredd has since become a guilty pleasure. Oh, I’m sorry. This is what happens when you don’t structure an editorial before writing it.
Let’s start over. If I had to count my favorite comic book characters excluding those from DC and Marvel, 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd would hover somewhere around in the top 5 spots. In the grim darkness of the future, in the dystopian Mega-City One, law and order are in the hands of a chosen few known as Street Judges. Think cops, but with a chip on their shoulders and a big pike up their butts. It’s hard to blame them. After all, if there was a list of worst places to live, Mega-City One would rank just below Gotham City. They are the judge, jury, and executioner with the power to enact justice on the spot, no paperwork necessary. As long as you do what they say and doesn’t do anything that pisses off the totalitarian regime, you’ll be fine. Sound like any place you know?
Joseph Dredd, portrayed by both Stallone and Urban in their respective films to varying degrees of success, is regarded as the best among the judges. He’s the one you’d call when shit goes South, North, East, and West. Stern, stoic. courageous and not willing to take shit from anybody, he’s the perfect judge, jury, and executioner. He’s basically Robocop, except that Dredd has a fully functioning genitalia.
Judge Dredd never received the same amount of mainstream popularity, certainly in the case of video games like some of his peers. There has been a handful of games based on Judge Dredd, but the fact that you have not heard about them says much about their popularity. Judge Dredd- Dredd vs Death is a first-person shooter developed by Rebellion (yes, that Rebellion) and released in 2003 in Europe and 2005 in North America (I hate it when games do this). It was poorly received in the west during its launch in 2005 and was heavily panned for the simplistic gameplay, dated graphics, and short single player campaign. Do remember that these are the same media houses that give annual iterations of the same game 8s and 9s. Fast forward 14 years and Judge Dredd- Dredd vs Death is sitting at a score of 9/10 based on 563 reviews in Steam. Is the game that good? Let’s just say that time has been kind to Dredd vs Death, something that doesn’t happen often.
Let me get this out of the way first. Dredd vs Death is not a great game. Hell, by 2019 FPS standards, it’s not even a good game. Then why did it garner such high scores on Steam? Because it’s fun! It’s fun as hell. Remember fun? Yeah, that thing most of the mainstream media takes for granted these days. The fact that it lives up to the supercop power fantasy, of being put in the shoes of Joe Dredd is also a huge plus for Dredd vs Death. It’s unapologetically silly, short, self-conscious and knows that it’s a video game. It’s also very cheap, cheaper than chocolate milkshake on a rainy Steam sale day. There’s not really any reason to not buy it.
Dredd vs Death is your average early 2000s FPS with early 2000s linear gameplay and level design. It’s not special or distinctive in any way. You play as the titular Joseph Dredd, the stuff of nightmares for criminals and wrongdoers. The game starts off with a tutorial so basic that Dredd himself says “did I really get called in for this?” It’s not long before you’re handed complete reins to Dredd in the really short campaign. I don’t hold the length of the campaign against the game because it doesn’t overstay its welcome and the game would have needed a lot more to offer for it was to hold the attention of the player for more than 5 hours.
The story of the game revolves around a mysterious plague running rampant in Mega-City one which turns its hapless denizens to zombies and oh, there are vampires too. Dredd is assigned to get to the bottom of the incident. It’s not soon for the Dark Judges, a bunch of disembodies spirits from another dimension who feel that death is the only way to attain absolute peace, breaks free from a maximum security prison and plans to destroy the world. Judge Death is the leader of the Dark Judges, and that’s how the title of the game came to be. It’s your average save the world story but this game has what others of its kind lack- This game has Judge Motherfragging Dredd!
Speaking of arresting, it’s one of the most fun aspects of the game. Dredd, being a police officer is able to disarm and arrest most of the rational player characters in the game regardless of whether they deserve it or not. The first objective of the game is basically to arrest some entitled liberals protesting outside one of the authority buildings. Dredd does indeed loves his job. Dredd vs Death will go down as the only game in the world where you can arrest obese people for being…well, obese. Now, now, before you point your pitchforks at me, remember that it’s a game and it’s all innocent fun. The developers have put some real effort into designing this arresting mechanic and thus, reading the charge sheet when arresting folks is genuinely funny. You know you’re doing real totalitarian police work when you can send a murdering gang member away for 4 months while locking up a guy away for life just because he looked at you funny. Dredd, like Stallone, likes to scream his lungs out while issuing orders and some of his dialogues are a real treat. Despite the nitty-gritty setting and all the violence that’s happening around you, Dredd vs Death never takes itself seriously and neither should you.
The gunplay in Dredd vs Death is decent, although it hasn’t aged well like Half Life 2 or Doom 3. It wouldn’t be a Dredd game without his iconic Lawgiver pistol and the assortment of fire modes that come with it. Basically, the pistol is all you need throughout the game. You can switch between various types of ammunition such as your standard bullets which can be fired automatically or semi-automatically, heat seeking bullets, exploding bullets, incendiary bullets, ricochet bullets, and armor-piercing bullets. Even though half of these are useless, it’s still great that the devs have faithfully imported over Dredd’s comic book roots. Aside from Lawgiver, there is a standard pistol, a laser pistol, two types of shotgun, a fast-firing sniper rifle, a railgun of sorts, an assault rifle and a grenade launcher. You shoot people in the face with these and they die violently.
As mentioned earlier, you can also arrest most of the human enemies for a higher score at the end of the level. Oh and I forgot to mention that if you kill too many innocents, or act more inhumane than you actually are, your law meter will go down and when it hits zero, you’ll automatically fail the mission. It’s easy to go from perfect “I’m recommending your name for another promotion” to “wtf are you doing” from your superior in the blink of an eye. The game has an arcadey feeling to it and even has an arcade mode present (alongside a multiplayer mode more dead than my insides). Most missions have a number of optional objectives which serves to increase your level score. At the end of each mission, you are judged (no pun intended) for the number of arrests, the average of your law meter, objectives completed and total years of sentence given (which can rack up to a pretty ridiculous number since you can go around slapping life sentence for every Tom, Dick, and Harry)
At the end of the day, Jude Dredd- Dredd vs Death is an average first-person shooter that somehow is more fun than the sum of its individual parts. The shooting is not that exciting, the game is really unpolished, the AI is dumb and yet, it’s hard to explain why this game is received so well these days (not for my lack of trying). It’s not really a cult classic and not that terrible to be deemed so bad it’s good. But somehow, there’s something magical hidden in the game that makes you say, “wow that wasn’t a waste of time at all” by the time you are done with Dredd vs Death. Do yourself a favor. Skip a meal for one day and buy the game the next time it goes on sale and let’s see if you feel the magic as well.
