The list of Steam recommendations is quite simple. Some of the games are fresh AAA releases, the rest are a varied collection of indie and old toys. JYDGE came out in 2017, so by today’s standards it can be considered an old indie. On the page it declared itself as “an anti-roguelike top-down shooter full of righteous violence”. The price is low, there was a discount, I took it to try. Now I’m writing a blog and trying to fill the void left after passing.
I’ll say it right away: anti-roguelike is a non-existent genre. It includes all games that are not considered roguelikes, i.e. Call of Duty, Xcom, The Elder Scrolls, Devil May Cry and the rest of the industry. We can officially declare that 10tons used clickbait.
There is no plot in the game. It’s as if there are 5 minute news releases in the game without any visual component and only with the logo of the news channel, but they will outline the situation to the maximum and resolve it immediately. Missions have a description, but it should rather describe what kind of place it is: bank, hospital, hotel. No characters, no motives. There are purely Judge Dredd motifs, but there is no one who can carry the charisma. The only peculiarity is the replacement of some vowel with “u” (that’s why jydge, not judge). The shotgun is actually a shotgun, the laser is lazur, the rocket is ruketa. It’s not clear whether this should cause laughter and an attack of Spanish shame. During Russification this element was missed, probably considered a typo. This game is clearly about gameplay and I have a strange relationship with it.
Top-down shooter is a genre I’m not very familiar with, which makes it difficult for me to determine how JYDGE stands out in its genre. It plays nice on its own. There are 18 levels, completion allows you to earn 3 medals: the first is the mission goal, the other 2 are additional. If you receive the required number of medals, you will receive a new element of Judge equipment: Judge modifier (maximum 4 at a time), Hammer modifier (maximum 3 at a time), special fire and main fire.
Judge Modifier best brings variety to the gameplay and affects the Judge and the environment: hacker module, shield, walk through walls, 100 times more health for hostages. Some modules are not needed (for example, turrets), some are needed for a certain type of mission (more on that later), and some are needed constantly (the hacker module must be taken at least for the first foray into the level for containers with currency that can only be opened by hacking).
Hammer Modifiers affect your Hammer rifle: longer firing range, increases melee damage, does not cause your damage to hostages, speeds up reloading. On some missions, certain modules are simply vital, for example, kills only in hand-to-hand combat.
Special fire – shooting with a limited supply of shells. You only need it until the main fire is pumped up (to blow up a wall, say), then you completely forget about it (bullets will do a better job and they are endless).
Main fire – the main method of fighting crime. There are several types of cartridges: lead, plasma, ion, laser. Arranged them in descending order of the number of types of fire. There are a lot of lead weapons, some plasma, a couple of ion and one laser. Plasma has a very short range, ion deals damage over time, laser only has one type of fire. Because of this, using lead weapons dominates the rest. One Hammer mod will increase lead damage by 50%, and another will increase plasma and ion damage by 25%. This is clearly a mess.
Upgrading is due to the https://europa777casino.co.uk/bonus/ purchase of new modules and an improved version of fire. A new module is cheap, a module slot is expensive, but upgrading fire to maximum costs the most. This will leave the player stuck using the current fire because it will take a serious investment to make sure the new fire beats the old one if it can. The balance is designed so that the best weapons require more medals, but the shotgun unlocked at the beginning, when fully upgraded, carries you right up to the end. There is a rapid-fire shotgun, which is ultimately more powerful, but in order for it to even reach the level of a pumped-up shotgun, it will have to be upgraded with a large amount of currency.
Also, pumping affects a feature of the game that is not stated anywhere – destructibility. An explosion, a strong blow, a strong shot will pierce a thin wall and leave a hole through which you can continue the fight, gain an advantage over the enemy, outwit him or simply bypass him. Not every game has it, especially not every top-down shooter (I’m not sure about this), but on the Steam page there is not a word about my favorite part of the game! The design of the locations is extremely interesting, the arrangement of the walls in a certain way gives scope for strategic thinking and a variety of shootings. For the sake of destruction, I took a shotgun at the beginning, since it destroyed walls well at first, but over time it destroyed them too easily. When pumping up damage, destroying walls becomes easier. Over time, I acquired a reinforced machine gun that fires slower than a regular machine gun, but with greater damage. At first it destroyed the wall with the fourth shot, but in the end it was no worse than a shotgun at crushing walls. The strategic value of the destructibility of the environment has depreciated with the ease of its implementation. What used to be fun entertainment has become casual fun.
Over time, unlocking missions requires unlocking medals. There are new difficulty modes for this. Normal is always available, after completing act 2 Hardcore will open, after act 3 Cruel, after completing all levels for the first time, Nightmare will open. At first I was partly happy, because there were more tasks, more gameplay, more fun with modifications and guns, but I realized that completing a level four times was a blatant waste of the game and the player’s time. Not all medals are interesting to receive. Most of them are easy and fun to unlock: kill all enemies in 30 seconds, take no damage, save hostages, complete a mission in 20 seconds. However, there are tasks that take you out of the immersion and are simply infuriating: don’t let yourself be seen, use only hand-to-hand combat, don’t destroy anything. These three tasks are the reason I dislike the game.
The gameplay is simple and interesting enough to play for hours. I was ready to knock out all the Steam achievements purely for the sake of a long passage, but the interest is completely lost after the obligatory clumsy stealth that works on crutches. You have a damage bonus against targets that haven’t noticed you, but for full stealth you need to equip certain Judge modules, thanks to which you are invisible when you are in the dark or when you stand still, otherwise you will definitely be seen at one time or another. I accept replaying a mission for a speedrun in 20 seconds, there will be a lot of attempts, but they are short and simple, and the stealth medal requires a long tedious walk around the level, and you won’t succeed the first time. Mandatory stealth is rare on normal difficulty, but on Nightmare it occurs on almost every level, making it a torture to get all the medals.
In addition to stealth there is a medal for using only melee combat. To obtain it, you also need to use specific modules, but this time you will need to select 3 modules out of about 7. This gives space, but does not eliminate the inconvenience of fighting hand-to-hand with people with firearms.
The medal for lack of destruction appears 1 time on Brutal difficulty and on every second mission in Nightmare. Due to the fact that pumped up weapons break everything too easily, you need to use an unpumped one or another type of weapon that you probably haven’t used before, since lead is king, and the laser also destroys walls after a ricochet.
I probably share the dissatisfaction I expressed above with some of the players, but I’m willing to bet that almost no one shares my thoughts on music.
The game’s music sounds good, but overall there are two confusing elements. Firstly, there is no specific melody attached to missions. When starting a task, a random song is selected from a large playlist. This gives missions freshness on the tenth run due to the screwed up invisibility medal, but at the same time good level design and location lose their musical character. A hospital is no different in sound from a bank, a nightclub is no different from a shopping market, the main lair of a criminal organization has no special character. The game sounds good right now, but it won’t be memorable in the long run. Secondly, the music was not written for the game. Artist Jay Man has written hundreds of pieces with a variety of moods for use by anyone for anything, from games to YouTube videos. Even the theme from the main menu, which is strongly associated with the game, was not written specifically for it. This is a clear sign that 10tons does not see JYDGE as a special game in their career, as a conscious creation, it is just another top-down shooter, of which they have plenty, which they release as if on an assembly line.
Neon Chrome was released in April 2016. From the screenshots I see a bunch of assets and models used in JYDGE. The tables, chairs, doors are identical, the reload icon is the same (!), there is the same destruction, a sea of blood. As a result, Neon Chrome visually differs from JYDGE only in its interface. From the covers it is clear that the first prefers the color purple and declares itself to be a cyberpunk, and the second is blue and presents itself not as a cyberpunk, but as an advanced state, but from the screenshots it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. I can’t figure it out, JYDGE is a sequel to Neon Chrome? Why is there nothing about the Overseer mentioned on the Steam page?? Why should it be a continuation if there is no connection?? The developers just used the same resources for no reason? Why didn’t anyone notice this then?? Why 10tons release so many top-down shooters? April 2016 – Neon Chrome, September 2016 – Xenoraid: The First Space War, August 2017 – Time Recoil, October 2017 – JYDGE, January 2018 – Tesla vs Lovecraft. Only Neon Chrome and JYDGE are visually similar, but 5 games in the same genre in 2 years is not a lot? If it’s ok, tell me about it. I honestly don’t fully understand this genre, but this concentration of releases in one genre for a studio must be exhausting or at least boring. If we take into account all releases, 11 games have been released over the past 2 years. Some look like very simple games, perhaps even for mobile phones, so I wouldn’t be surprised if 10tons quickly makes simple games so that they feed the entire studio a little bit.
The last 2 paragraphs I could well be talking nonsense to most people. This is the first time I have come across this type of developer, this is the first time I have seen such a game that would give so much joy in the first three hours, and then slide into a routine. Is it really too much to ask for?? I’m a snob? This is the problem I have. I can’t figure out if my bar is set too high or if the game just doesn’t meet my needs. At the moment of completion you feel “Commendable” (although I spent most of the blog complaining), but the final impression of the game after a while is no higher than “Prokhodnyak”. After a while, 10tons will release a new TDS and the game will be forgotten. A good analogy is a balloon. It’s colorful, it’s big, it’s fun, but it’s empty inside and over time it will deflate and turn into a shriveled piece of rubber, and then you get yourself another balloon that will suffer the same fate. In this case, you need to give it “Commendable” for its current beauty, or give it “Prokhodnyak” for its fragility? I’m confused. What do you think?