Virgin Games
£9.99/£14.99

Judge 'Old Stoney Face' Dredd is one of the longest running and best loved characters from 2000AD comic and now you get to control Mega-City One's finest cop Dredd battles through six levels, each based on a Dredd story. Gameplay is essentially that of a shoot-em-up, and similar to RoboCop as you view the eight-way scrolling action from side on in the game Dredd does what he's best at, catching 'perils'.

Level one takes you to Dan Tanna block where the League Of Fatties are running riot and eating all that comes to hand. So, with trusty Lawgiver gun in hand and Lawmaster bike on call, your prime objective is to shut down four food dispensers and then guard the food convoy as it trundles into the city to feed the starving millions. Watch out for the fatties as they throw food at you and even jump off walkways in an attempt to flatten you. The status panel shows your energy (knocked down by attackers) and the rising crime level: the idea is to keep your energy high and the crime rate low.

Scene two takes you to Charles Darwin block where Professor Fribb has created an enzyme that reverses the process of evolution. Unfortunately, some of the deadly enzyme has escaped through the vents and the inhabitants of the block are now less than human. Here Dredd must again walk through platform alter platform apprehending lizards, amoebas and monkeys whilst closing the outlets from the ventilation system. Once this is done he heads for Fribb's lab to arrest the amoeba that the unfortunate Prof has become.

Levels three, four and five cover the events of one of my favourite Dredd stories - Blockmania. The Sov Block agent Orlok has started blockmania, induced gang warfare, in the City and Dredd must stop him and his comrades who are contaminating the Aqua Plant in level three. In level four, his Aqua Plant plan thwarted, Orlok tries to contaminate the Weather Station. Level five sees Dredd trying to control the outbreak of blockmania. And level six? My advice is give up now because the four Dark Judges Fear, Fire, Mortis and Death pay Mega-City a visit and it's up to you to get rid of them using dimension bombs. Good luck Dredd, you'll need it!

A far better game than the original Judge Dredd game by Melbourne House, Virgin have done a good job in adapting the 2000AD strips. My only slight moan is that the six levels look and play very much the same: you wander around the playing area bagging the baddies and shutting off four valves/vents/food dispensers etc. Graphically the game is good, especially the cartoon style drawings that appear when Dredd calls his bike and is hospitalised through loss of energy. The sound track on the 128K version is neat too.

Gameplay is tough: keeping the crime rate down and your personal energy level up takes a lot of practice. Add to that the novel logging-on to the Justice Department computer system before playing (a 9.0 million gigawatt computer, indeed!) makes Judge Dredd a playable package. It's a shame about the limited content though.

MARK [79%]

Don't be put off by the small size of the playing area shown on-screen, when the action begins you soon forget about that G-so much happens! Judge Dredd is very well presented, the introductory computer terminal section with its many functions gives that extra sparkle to a game that's little more than a shoot-'em-up. Gameplay is tough but enjoyable as you stomp around the walkways killing off the appropriate perps. However, you have to watch who you're shooting, as killing a normal civilian doesn't do you any good! Each level is big, and mapping is a worthwhile job as getting lost isn't difficult! For its many loads (yeah, it's a multi-load) the gameplay does not really differ from level to level, and it's the repetitive nature of the gameplay that prevents Judge Dredd from being a real hit.
RICHARD [76%]

Virgin
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: David Wilson

As the famous toothless budgie put it. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again'. Never has this been so true as in the case of 2000AD licences.

Loads of people have recognised the potential for a fab game based on the characters in Britain's favourite (sorry Viz) second-favourite comic, but few (ie none) have managed a really successful adaptation. Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis The Warlock, even Dredd himself - they've all been done (and done fairly badly, it has to be said). Let's see what they manage this time round, eh, Spec-chums?

Programmed by Random Access - the Sales Curve bods responsible for the classic Silkworm, the Double Dragon games et at - this new Dredd is a viewed-from-the-side romp through Mega City One. As well as his weapon (fnar) - the Lawgiver, which fires three types of ammo - the Judge also has at his disposal the Lawmaster, his trusty armoured motorbike. In some levels he walks around the place on foot, in others he rides the bike. (In fact, in one later level he actually rides a flying version of it!)

Each section of the game takes its scenario from a different Dredd comic strip - Level One, for instance, is based on the famous Fatties Revolt story. Here Dredd has to explore a maze of platforms and ramps, finding and turning off four food dispensers before the rampaging fatties - citizens who've turned themselves into one-ton monsters by gross overeating - can get their bellies round them. It's a case of ducking, dodging and shooting fatties while keeping an eye on the metre that indicates the crime rate. If Dredd is arresting or shooting lots of perps the crime rate comes down, but if he gets injured, say, and has to go to hospital it zooms right up again (let the crime rate reach maximum and its Game Over). Having successfully turned off the machines, he then has to find the exit and move onto the second part of the level - protecting a food convoy from the lard buckets!

Later levels are based on other 2000AD stories - the second one is about a city block where an escaped enzyme has reversed evolution and turned the population into monkeys (!), the third and fourth are about Sov-City agents trying to contaminate the Mega City water supply, while the fifth introduces the Dark Judges - bizarre beings from a dimension where life itself is a crime!

All these original 2000AD ideas have been coupled with a fair few neat touches from the programmers as well. The action is often interspersed with still comic frames (almost like digitised pages from the comic books) to explain what's going on, and there's a good deal of humour dotted about the place too.

For instance, the game opens with a computer terminal type screen where Dredd has to log on. Here you can select to go on patrol (and so play the game), or perhaps check through Dredd's mail or even play a handful of sub-games (apparently what judges do in their spare time!) which look suspiciously like stuff last seen on the Vic 20!

But (yep, here it comes) despite all the variety - and the different tasks Dredd has to complete on each level - the basic gameplay remains more or less the same throughout. What we've got here is rather a lot of scrolling around the map, arresting. shooting, and destroying/turning things off, and it can all get a bit boring rather quickly.

The fact that the Dredd sprite is so small and the graphics so monochrome doesn't help things much either. The game's spartan look probably allows for quite some depth of play - each of the six stories is in two parts, so that's 12 levels - so if you stick with it you'll more than get your money's worth, but personally I'd rather have seen Dredd given the Last Crusade/Batman The Movie type treatment - bigger sprites, more varied gameplay and less scenarios. It's like they've tried to get too much in and as a result spread everything too thin. I dunno, maybe for Dredd it'll be third time lucky. Ho hum.

Label: Virgin
Price: £9.95
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

The time; the near future. The place; Mega-City One, hugest of the conurbations to survive the RadWars. The man; Judge Dredd, old big-chin himself. Fearless upholder of the law, symbol of justice and discipline, and the man who invented the phrase "No-one is innocent" Judge Dredd is the cult hero of the century, and this is his second outing in pixel form (the first being an un zargaz budget game a couple of years ago).

If you haven't heard of the Judge, you must have had your head in bucket since 1980. Star of the galaxy's best comic, 2000 AD, of Daily Star comic strips and a rumoured forthcoming film, the Judge is a 21st century combination of judge, jury and executioner whose Lawgiver gun and Law-master bike strike terror into the perpetrators of crime - Perps - of the massive Mega-city One. Unemployment, food shortages, technocrimes, berserk citizens and exotic vices make the Megacity a pretty hairy place to live so the Judge and his colleagues have their work cut out keeping things in order.

In the comic, the current Judge is an old and embittered warrior who has begun to question the totalitarianism of the system he works to uphold, but in this game we're back to the good old days where he shot first and filled in the charge-sheets afterwards.

The game kicks of with an MS-DOS style log-on sequence. Apart from reading the Judge's mail, getting background information on the game and orders for the day and setting your control options, you can also log on to two sub-games; a version of the classic Bomber from the year dot (you know, plane flies over buildings, drops bombs to knock them down) and a version of Snakes (guide snake around garden eating up food and avoiding obstacles). Why they're there I don't know.

Once you log into the actual game, you get a short introductory sequence explaining the mission for each level. The playing area takes up a small section of the middle of the screen, with various displays and readouts around the edges. There are six levels, each following a roughly similar platforms-and-ladders (or rather, platforms-and-ramps) format. In the first, the Judge has to fight of Fatties. These gargantuan over-eaters have gone berserk in a Food Riot, and Dredd's task is to shut off four food dispensers. These are located randomly around the large playing area.

The Fatties attack from all sides and plunge from walkways, and can be dispatched with a single shot from Dredd's Lawgiver. This keeps the Crime Rate down; if you don't keep shooting, the rate goes up and you risk being called to Justice HQ. You must be careful though not to shoot ordinary citizens, because this contributes to the crime rate too. Dredd's energy level is also displayed on a bar graph on the left; if this falls too low, he has to take a trip to hospital, with a nice cartoon-style graphic sequence.

The other main game feature is the Lawmaster bike. Call this up and you get a short sequence, then the bike appears; this allows you to zoom around the levels faster, but you can't shoot while you ride (a daft bit since in the comic the Lawmaster is equipped with enormous laser cannon).

Picking up the odd token marked with a H or L gives you heat-seeking or laser ammunition for a short time. If you disable all four food dispensers, you have to find an open doorway at the bottom of the playing area and pass through it into a sequence where you have to defend a food convoy. This is the format for most of the other levels; on one you have to fight off Sov agent and disable gas vents, on another fight mutants, then robots, and so on. There's another challenge at the end of each level too, but on the last, Level Six, your enemies are the Dark Judges, and your task is to collect Dimension Bombs to defeat them. If you complete this level, we're promised a spectacular end sequence, which we won't spoil the fun by describing...

Judge Dredd may not set any new standards for graphics, sound or gameplay, but it's full of authentic Dreddian detail which should appeal to fans. If the Judge is new to you (which I can hardly believe), get some 2000 AD's, or check out the Best of 2000 AD Monthly back issues, and give it a bash.

Virgin
Spectrum £9.99, ST £19.99

The Marshall of Mega-City One is back - and he still isn't smiling. Those with large memories will remember that Melbourne House released a Judge Dredd game several years ago, but unfortunately it wasn't up to the standard befitting such a character. In Virgin's addition to the saga, Ol' Stoney Face is out to stop another crime wave which threatens to destroy the future metropolis completely! First off, Dredd has to stop the League of Fatties from gorging themselves on all of Mega-City's food supplies. To do this, he must locale and destroy four food generators, but this is no easy task - the Fatties are aware of his plans, and are out en masse to put the weight on (so to speak).

Fatties can be blasted, but there are perps (criminal perpetrators, for those who don't know) to be wasted for extra ammo (such as heat-seekers or high-energy shells). Ordinary citizens are around and about and if these are killed, the crime wave increases dramatically!

Dredd also has his Lawmaster cycle, with which he can zoom around the city at high speed, but for this he has to sacrifice all of his fire power (which is strange, as the bike is supposed to have a flippin' great cannon on the front!).

Once the level is complete, Dredd has to move on to new and more dangerous missions, leading up to the climax - Dredd against the four Dark Judges - Fear, Fire, Mortis, and a particularly nasty piece of work called Death...