YMMV / Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death

• Anti-Climax Boss: All of the Dark Judges, except for Fear, are actually quite easy to defeat. Mortis is defeated by gassing him and then chasing him into a quarantine booth. Fire can be forced to move out of the smokatorium by activating the sprinklers and forcing him into the ventilation fans. Even Judge Death, while invulnerable, is beaten by freeing the three Psi judges he's drawing energy from. Ironically, Judge Fear, the one Dark Judge who is actually vulnerable to firearms, is the hardest to defeat due to him being a Damage-Sponge Boss who is only vulnerable to shotgun fire, throws traps around like sweets, and is assisted by hordes of vampires.
• Complete Monster:
  • Video game:
    • Judge Death is as evil as ever. A former Judge from his homeworld, Death decided that all crime is committed by the living and thus life itself is a crime. Creating Dark Judges, Death wiped out all life in his world, reducing it into a wasteland filled with undead abominations. After being released from his prison, Death uses an Apocalypse Cult to fatally torture four Psi-Judges in a ritual that gives him and his fellow Dark Judges physical bodies. Sending the other Dark Judges to spread death and destruction all over Mega-City One, Death takes over the Resyk facility and slaughters nearly everyone there, before turning them into zombies. After Dredd destroys his body, Death flees back to Deadworld with the immortal body of Dr. Richard Icarus to possess it and make himself invulnerable. When confronted, Death reveals to Dredd that he has captured the Psi-Judges and plans to drain them of their energy so he can use it to merge Deadworld with Dredd's universe, killing everything in Mega-City One.
    • Dr. Richard Icarus is the creator of the PetRegen serum, who seeks complete immortality. Desiring to perfect his immortality serum, Icarus infected countless people with his PetRegen virus, transforming them into mindless vampires and zombies, who were then unleashed upon Mega-City One, slaughtering many innocents. When Judge Dredd broke into his facility, Icarus, uncaring about the deaths of his men, tried to kill him by unleashing the vampires on him.
  • Novelization, by Gordon Rennie: Judge Death, the twisted leader of the Dark Judges, led his comrades in the utter eradication of their entire world into a barren wasteland of ghosts and wraiths. In Mega-City One, Death has countless innocents rounded up and subjected to "judgement" by himself and his brothers before being sealed off, only to return and direct the Dark Judges on new paths to slaughter until he merges his Deadworld with Earth to kill all that lives for the sin of life.
• Narm: Arguably the game is full of this, given the apparently rushed implementation of some of the game's environments, repetitive enemies and the strangely janky cutscenes. Cutscenes start and stop abruptly and are often full of goofy animations or weird pauses, which often makes some of the more serious moments extremely cheesy or unintentionally funny.
  • Particularly notable is the cutscene with Judge Death in Resyk. He's dangling a man over a vat of acid in what is apparently supposed to be a terrifying villainous scene. Instead the man is animated in a bizarre and primitive way, wiggling his limbs around unnaturally with his mouth gaping open and closed like a fish. It doesn't help that the camera is really close to the low-res textures too. Dredd simply stands there gormlessly for what feels like ages, and as the man is slowly dropped in the acid he clips straight through it and disappears.
  • Many of the comments citizens make when arrested come across as narm-y, as they don't vary depending on the sentence they're being given and often seem inappropriately jaunty. People will give Dredd the same kind of sassy "Easy with the cuffs, buddy!" remark, whether he is sentencing them to one month in jail or a whole life term in prison.
  • The evacuation vehicle in one level has some really narm-y, hammy voice acting. The driver keeps wailing and screaming about how he is being overwhelmed with death cultists even though you've already killed all the enemies.
  • The prison level features a very long dramatic build-up to seeing the dreaded Iso Cubes, where Dredd sends perps. When we finally see them, in a whole block of a mega-prison no less, the Cubes consist of one bizarrely small room containing about 20 tiny cells.
  • The constant and extremely unsubtle Red Bull product placement often sends the grittier levels of the game into narm territory. We can't even get Dredd riding his bike without a close-up of him over-dramatically crushing an empty can of Red Bull. There's even a side objective to arrest a gang of Red Bull smugglers in an otherwise more tonally serious level.
• Narm Charm: Dredd's over-the-top cheesy lines are quite entertaining.
• Nightmare Fuel: Judge Fear, fitting enough. His voice is the stuff of nightmares.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Support from fellow judges. Street judges only appear in a few levels and often they're engaged in their own problems, rarely allowing the opportunity to use them as backup. The frequency of Med judges drops off sharply after only a few levels with med packs scavenged from corpses or just left laying around, though even these are quite rare. Tek judges suffer the worst with the only example appearing during the tutorial.