Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death

I'll be straight with you: I came into this one looking for something to shoot stuff with on a lazy afternoon, not a competitive experience. Dredd vs. Death is a 2003 first-person shooter built on the 2000 AD comic license, and it does exactly two things better than you'd expect and everything else at exactly the level the Metacritic score of 55 implies. The Lawgiver pistol is the headline mechanic and it's the one piece of genuine design work here. Six fire modes in a single sidearm: Standard, Armor Piercing, Ricochet, Incendiary, High Explosive, and Heat Seeker. Switching modes mid-fight and adapting to whatever undead nightmare is rushing you is the closest this game gets to satisfying gunplay. The second clever thing is the law meter. Blast a surrendered perp, torch a civilian with Incendiary rounds, or go full rogue and the meter drains. Drain it completely and the Special Judicial Squad shows up to execute you. In practice it rarely becomes a real threat because the game telegraphs every violation loudly, but the mechanic at least earns the fantasy of playing a fascist-cop-in-a-satire-city rather than just a space marine with a different hat. The campaign itself is eleven short levels that clock in around three to five hours depending on your pace. Eleven levels of vampires, zombies, and undead cultists chasing you through corridors, which sounds fine until you realise there is almost no variety in enemy tactics from start to finish. The AI is weak, the four boss fights are particularly tepid, and the escort objectives are buggy enough that killing the person you are supposed to protect is sometimes the only way to unstick the mission. The writing leans hard into the comic's satirical tone, with plenty of heavy-handed jabs at consumerism delivered by voice acting that ranges from passable to unintentionally funny, which is very on-brand for Dredd. Where the game has more legs is outside the campaign. The arcade mode runs twelve challenge levels with a scoring system that unlocks cheat codes, and multiplayer offers deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture-and-hold, Protect the VIP, and a capture-the-flag variant called Umpty Raid across over a dozen maps with more than 60 playable characters. Bot support means you can actually populate a match today without needing live players, which is the only realistic way anyone is filling those lobbies in 2024. Two-player co-op through the full campaign over LAN is also there if you have a friend willing to dig in. Completing campaign missions and arcade challenges unlocks multiplayer skins and maps, so there is a progression loop that ties everything together more cohesively than you might expect from a budget title of this era. The PC version has a well-documented technical issue worth flagging for anyone on modern hardware: movement physics are tied to the framerate, so running the game uncapped on a high-refresh monitor makes jumping unreliable to impossible. Cap your framerate, and be aware the in-game anti-aliasing option can cause crashes. This is early-2000s jank that nobody ever patched, and on a 144hz or 240hz panel it will surface immediately. Once capped and stable, the game runs fine, though it looks exactly as old as it is.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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