“Judge Dredd vs Zombies” ? The Glorification of Fascistic Oppression of the Undead
I’m not about to pretend to be a huge expert on Judge Dredd. I’ve read a few comics, and I did see the Stallone movie, which like most moviegoers I’ve largely repressed.
There was.. a robot, right? Yeah. Ignorance is bliss here.
Well, someone had the bright idea to take Judge Dredd, splash in a little Anti-Zombie mayhem, and sell the resulting game for mobile devices:
The scenario? Who cares? This is Dredd executing ever larger mobs of zombies, wisecracking on the way. It doesn’t really matter why. The plot is no more pertinent to the gameplay than those angry birds’ motivation for catapulting themselves at pigs. The fun is in the flinging or, here, the fighting.
It must be hard for the writers of a comic book, or anything else for that matter, to see their work adapted for a game where only the tiniest scraps of their creativity survive, solely as window-dressing for the violent spectacle du jour.
Ah well. Is it at least an innovative, original game, one that breaks new ground in the way people spend their leisure time?
And, let’s be honest, Dredd vs Zombies is Angry Birds, with guns, the undead and better dialogue. But it’s the same repetitive gameplay, with AB’s individual levels here rendered as rooms and corridors within a bigger level.
As soon as you enter each section, the doors slam closed and you have to destroy the undead within if you want to proceed. Bizarrely, they come up through the floor – in a tower block? – more appearing as the initial horde are laid to rest.
All done, the doors open and Dredd can proceed to the next lot.
Guess not.
There’s a part of me that, of course, wants to be offended that the Judge Dredd universe is now being cast in an official Living Supremacist mode; then again, Dredd more or less shoots everyone in the face, right? That’s the point I think; savage brutality and capriciousness have become a poor substitute for law and justice in Dredd’s horrible dystopian future.
Would Judge Dredd shoot a Zombie? I’m sure he would. Probably over nothing more than a parking ticket. So I guess we’ll let that one slide, at least as an issue of *fairness*.
Instead, the Zombie Rights Movement should be offended that this game demonstrates once again that the cheapest and crassest route to quick videogame cash in the modern world is to take whatever game you wanted to make and toss a little Anti-Zombiism in for the masses to lap up.
It’s our task to enlighten them as to how wrong that is. If the market for Anti-Zombie ‘entertainment’ dries up, then we won’t see any more games like ‘Judge Dredd vs Zombies’. And I think that’s a brighter future for everyone.
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