Judgment 2018 Game Review - GameGame

Hi everybody this is gamegame as always it's my continuing mission to explore strange new games with you to seek out new titles and do reviews that aren't 2 minutes long are filled with sponsored bull crap today we're sitting down to take a look at the long awaited judgement for ps4 developed and published by Sega judgment's a spin-off of the Japanese crime lords syndicate inspired titles Yakuza except here you're exploring the world through the eyes of next lawyer and private detective taki ug Yagami as he investigates a series of murders and un covers the truth of a crime in a case that completely shattered his world one part yok is at one part la noir and a bit ace attorney rubbed up on the in there for good measure judgment was originally released for the ps4 in Japan December 2018 but sees its way to the rest of us June 21st for those who pre-ordered on PSN in June 25th for the normal Edition let's see how it did shall we as always if you liked the video maybe subscribe or if you don't like me go out and find a smaller blogger and give them a subscription maybe hit that Bell button so you can actually get notified of their stuff especially now with YouTube so crazy so without further ado here's my review for judgment missions absolutely possible black belt lawyers and the excellence of playing the sing a game inside another Sega game because you know what you like Sega games graphics are up first I gotta say the Dragon engine continues to impress here on the console with excellent visuals color use and effects regardless if you're tailing a possible con artist through the neon soak lights of the city one moment or taking pictures of adulterers hump and neighbors half their age in crappie hotels the next I have always loved the Yaak is a cityscape and they nail it here take the gritty side streets of most major cities and then dose them in an LSD tab or two of color and effects and this is pretty much what you get everything has a nice saturated Sheen to it in a good picture though at times thealiasing does actually show up in a couple of places but what the auxins have always done is interlaced one ofthe most fantastically realistic feeling locations with interaction and judgment does that with the same incredible number of buildings explorable people to meet and secret places to find judgment really continues to fill out the world of yakuza but seen from the side of the men and women in blue as well as the lawyers that work on the often shady consistently dangerous side of the law there's a natural feeling to the game world that comes with the expertise of knowing the game engine and how far you can actually push it rarely do elements of it look gamified instead it's an organic explorable city scape where one turn leads you to a small corner store and the next leads you to some out-of-the-way coffee shop that wants you to blind taste-test all the graphics in the world are not gonna help you if you don't actually know what to do with them the game world is incredibly detailed from fully furnished stores on multiple floors in some locations as well as excellent numbers of NPCs all of the screen always making everything actually feel alive in the city streets when it comes to the texture work in the details around what the prior titles have offered and while there are some games especially recently that I think if eclipse did the seriously huge number of characters that you're gonna meet through the games 12plus chapters tons of side missions in various mini games really never shows any weak side rarely do you get an npc waddling in who looks like their face was created at a waxworks with an over taxed employee at the helm just pumping out the details overall everyone looks good and fits the game world though NPCs that you don't meet are gonna be a bit of a step down from everyone else it still works overall with the aesthetic and that's continued on when it comes to the animations for the characters and the ever growing martial arts list the main character acquires as well as the diverse enemies that you mean it all fits into a low gravity high impact fighting engine that we've seen before the designs are really solid even if the main characters pants are so tight that if he was in the police forces rank would be sausage now when it comes to the performance this is a 30fpstitle so if you're waiting for a higher fps you might want to stick around for a possible PC port later down the line that out of the way and never really wavers below 30 unless it's loading a scene and then there's a momentary blip and then it's back to normal I do have a couple complaints though when doing some activities you get interrupted weirdly like say running and you get a phone call while that's no big deal in a lot of games in judgments something happens I haven't seen in the engine before and I test it on the Pro and the normal ps4on SSD and on normal hard drives for some reason the game sometimes pauses a moment before those events happen it's not always but it happens occasionally also I love the ability to use first person in the game and enjoy just walking around the city it isn't fully fledged first-person camera and well sometimes you're able to do it most of the times it'll pop you out into third-person for a lot of the activities how does this all come together though I would say judgment lane around where the latest Yakuza games have landed we've had one come in at60fps unfortunately this does not hit that this series excellent design and glitz though continues and it really excels here and you don't get an open world bereft a location standard but stretching out into the horizon instead it's a small town simulator with an attention to detail to bring it to life as much as possible and with those goal sin mind judgment hits the mark sound music and voice what was the point of it I was trying to get away from a co pass hole just wouldn't get off my case but when I saw you on the phone I had the greatest idea okay oh I had that day off man if anyone's gonna know it's our manager he doesn't come in till nighttime though the manager huh this him oh it is what's his name over on soup on the street me and a few months ago knee boys had a little run-in with a Kure guy turns out that was your boy khoomei and let's do music first and I'm not sure what I expected here but what I got was actually a great deal more and that's a nice surprise judgment completely changes the soundtrack I was expecting with a very heavy new or inspired soundtrack throughout the entire game easily identifiable in here are a number of jazz influence tracks and sections as well as a thicker lower leveled to the music when you're exploring that did wonders to set the mood of a more gritty tale than the past games did there are times like battles both boss and random where it picks up and suddenly some electric guitars wailing in the background like power chords are endangered and playing them is the only way to keep them for Prosperity nevertheless even those moments start to settle down and there's this nice blanket of moody but sedate themes that starts to play out with percussions lightly tapping in the background interspersed with some excellent low ebb riffs all of it seamlessly evoking that older newer style if I had any complaints it's that occasionally it doesn't feel like a collective whole and much of that is due to how the game is played in a nonlinear fashion which I'll discuss a bit in the gameplay section but it's a small problem that I don't see bothering anybody and I wouldn't listen to this outside of the game but within the title it works really well and let's do voice next so one thing to remember do to the main voice actor from the Japanese version the game getting caught stroke in the fires of his inner artist by snorting a railroad container worth of cocaine and promptly being replaced that means the voice actor in judgment isn't the same one in this game as it is in the Japanese version you do have the choice of playing with either Japanese or English subtitles as well as voiceovers and both actually do a really good job being emotive and driving home moments of quiet respect like the main character when he's dealing with NPCs he feel he's let down or the main over the top moments when a boss battle occurs voice work in the Aqsa series have always been a big fan of overall and that continues in judgment one extra element of work that the developers did was to make sure that the English voiceovers actually lip sync with the Japanese words it's not perfect but you can actually notice now that being said judgment doesn't go for nearly as much over the top sentiment and circus-like moments of the original game resulting in a main character that at times I think a lot of people are gonna feel is a bit dry for me though I'd say it was fun and lastly when it comes to this audio section we're gonna talk about sound I would say this game really continues the excellent work of the past titles enveloping the player and a feeling of walking through a living City with all manner of ambient environmental sounds emerging as you move around in your missions and interact the people in the game world samples of people talk in animals cars of various environmental actions all play out in a seamless blend that never really brings attention to any one element and I like that but I think we all like the battle and when you jump into the action and grab some random store owners sign without their permission and then beat an enemy to the point that not even their parents are gonna be able to recognize them it sounds really good with a crash of bulbs and plastic when swinging a sign to the clang of spokes and rattle the metal parts when throwing a bike into an enemy's face hard enough he's gonna shits rockets for the next six weeks the game perfectly handles the switching from the more sedate to well the more psychotic I will have to say that one issue that seemed to crop up occasionally is in the heavier populated areas you still do get that occasional moment of static din that occurs especially when crowds begin to sound a bit less like people and a bit more like grandpa trying to find that FM station on the radio that went out of business in 1945 other than that damn good and that brings us to gameplay and a bit about the story in judgment you play as private detective Takayama Yagami who prior to the starting of the game used to be a lawyer but your bad judgment a particularly loathsome case is seeing you taken on private detective work instead the game starts out quickly immersing you in the first of a number of cases that both extend the Oxus storyline at least tangentially by further fleshing out some of the locations and just giving more color to the world as well as a focus on the other side of the Yaak is a life style the game follows the main theme of your mistake and the repercussions felt both in the past and now it all comes down to the core gameplay of the Yaak is a titles which is a lot of the same herewith you exploring the game world interacting with characters furthering stories by doing quests forum and of course the Yaak is a staple which is randomly bumping into street thugs who can't seem to use a phone to call each other and warn each other that a hipster looking private detective with hair like Sonic the Hedgehog has been kicked and they ever living shit out everyone so you know maybe don't attack him every chance you get and while the de cat a me in the Yaak as a game was always about a character who wanted peace but always got war here that I caught him he is a character who should be kicking back with a law book who's such an absolute badass it's like Allan schore from Boston illegal mixed his DNA with Chuck Liddell and that dude from The Last Dragon and then gave themselves superpowers and speaking of superpowers lighting has the core mechanics here of the original games it's got it down pat with various attacks and dodges and lock-on abilities and so forth it also changes up the gameplay a bit first you have two fighting styles one is more suited for mono e mono prepping you for harder single characters and is a hard hit and punch at hon where most of the time it looks like you're trying to mimic the Hadron Collider with a fist in someone else's sternum then there's the more open and free style for multi opponents which stresses a bit more freedom of movement and some over-the-top moves to keep you away from the grasp of enemies and you can switch between the two at any time and battle also once again you have a massive skill tree separated into three main groups that you experience when you're doing activities in the world the three categories are battle special and ability which includes tons of upgrades for combat moves as well as mini games helping you during the investigation scenes increasing bonuses from resting and eating and so forth now speaking of the investigations let's see if this is magnum p.i or castle in judgment you investigate cases in this new mode as well as looking over crimes and identifying clues and putting the pieces together of the cases slowly by filling out your case book to drive down enough details that you can fulfill the requirements of the story chapter sometimes you're using a drone to spy on people around the city and locate the mother times you're tailing people and other times you're just collecting clues and then going back to the police department or your contacts or various less savory people and trying to pull it all together that plus the main story moments make up a lot of the core narrative gameplay investigating crime scenes is actually pretty cool though not incredibly detailed with you usually looking over space and identifying different unique key elements to a crime scene or pictures and then later going and talking to NPCs and sometimes showing them the picture or pointing out different details feels about as deep as typical side stuff in your cos of feels which is to say not a lot but it works and it does flesh out the investigator role that doesn't mean all the activities are good the act of tailing people in particular is half-baked mechanically at best and the main characters about as stealthy as a bag of smashed assholes with some feet duct tape to it's a yok as a game anyway so you're constantly crashing in the ship between bikes and people and signs and walls and doors and traffic cones and guard rails putting a stealth mini game into it was already gonna be challenging on the best of days they even indicate as much with a bunch of tutorials and even a skill or two wrapped around the fact that you smash like a guy damn dan rage bowl through the city's communal bicycle storage it's not gonna alert the person you're following as much also like so many titles with these kind of elements the NPC's are anything but observant tailing them usually involves you walking behind them as they manned or back and forth across the street sometimes looking backwards to see who is following them now this results on the hilarity of you standing there open mouth as you caught the middle of the frigg in street and the NPC's awareness meter climbing towards failure so of course you'd do the thing that just screams ninja you sprint across a street leap over a set of traffic cones and then dive behind a pile of bikes and smash the button to go into cover to which the NPC shrugs and thinks to themselves that is way more normal than a dude just walking in the same direction as me and promptly continues to move on and I'm not sure why tailing and Games hasn't seen improvements since the damned ps1 era but really whenever these moments come up and gameplay the same problems rear their ugly heads luckily as I said this never actually gets in the way in the game but it is unintentionally hilarious many times when you're doing that and it doesn't stop there there's the photography mission so sometimes you need to gather evidence for a case and that means following someone and lining up a camera shot or tracking a criminal down and doing the same thing each shot has a number of requisites that need to be in the picture listed on the right like the person something near them a sign and so on which all have to be done in a single shot or boom game over screen where you can either retry or leave the activity the issue here is the game for whatever reason just consistently updates the list and indicates if your camera view has all the needed elements and it does it with audible notifications so waiting for the perfect shot sounds like you're playing a Sega Master System games the menus like ding ding ding Dilli ding ding dingding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding just checking boxes then un checking them then checking them again then unchecking them and changing his mind checking them again I actually like those missions regardless of that but damned if that did not get annoying while playing however I sat there and ended up doing a bunch of those missions anyway because I actually enjoyed how they came together and the little stories and narratives it's just a little bit odd now when it comes to Yakuza it's always relished in aside-dishes mini games and judgment is the same from playing arcade games and Sega the at resto datin girls to various collection activities outfit in your little office with knick-knack go into the batting cages and so forth and here also flying drones and races sadly there's no karaoke to be seen which is a sad omission it may be related to the original Japanese voice actor singing career in the lack of desire to overlap or some kind of cost issue but sadly we don't have it now despite the issues I talked about with the stealth sections the investigations and the story itself is actually really interesting they do a fantastic job elevating judgment to the level close to its predecessors and what you get is a game that isn't just a side story or a quick note in the history of gaming like gears or judgment or one of those crappy Assassin's Creed 2d games they tried to sneak in here you get a full-fledged sibling and not the out-of-state cousin with questionable DNA mapping it works it tells a unique story that offers more to the world and it's easy to be plain and think to yourself what are the other characters doing from the other games right now and you have to expect someone to sprint by chasing thugs just like you were doing in those games that’s for today share this post.