JYDGE

You play the titular Jydge (pronounced "judge" with a dystopian Y), a dreadful robotic cop sent in to rescue hostages, defuse bombs, and slaughter gang members across nineteen stages. On its surface, it's a twin stick shooter based around completing various objectives in seemingly small levels. But boy, is there more than a surface here.

There are thirty-five player modifications, fourteen weapons, thirty weapon mods, and fifteen secondary weapons you can unlock. Each level seems small, but they're dense with intersecting paths, multiple entrances, pockets of darkness, and destructible walls and barriers. All of this means that there's an absurd range of possible solutions to every problem. A single mission could be solved by walking through the front door guns blazing, or stealthily sniping from the shadows, or hacking through a back way, or converting enemies to fight for you, or literally becoming a giant and running through walls, turning enemies into pulp with a swing of your Gavel. (Gavyl?)

JYDGE valiantly condenses the complex interplay of an immersive sim into an arcadey shooter. Of course, this is still made by 10tons, with all the bullet dodging and ultraviolence that entails. But JYDGE aspires to be something deeper than that, which it tries to convey through objectives and setups that force you to constantly retool your Jydge for the task at hand.

But that's where it gets controversial. At its core, this is a game about replaying. Every level has four difficulties with increasingly harder layouts and their own set of three objectives (one primary, two secondary). Each objective in a level gives a medal, and medals are needed to unlock more levels and upgrades. It's often not possible to get both secondary objectives in one playthrough, so many times a level will need to be beaten twice per difficulty if you want to get everything. Curiously, there are certain elements in a level that carry over between playthroughs; doors that are locked need a key, but will stay open once they're unlocked, and there are certain named enemies that function like minibosses, but they'll stay dead once they're killed. Often, these will get in the way of completing secondary objectives, so you'll sometimes need to unlock those doors and kill those enemies in an earlier playthrough to achieve the objective in a later replay.

What this all means is that if you want the full experience of the game, you'll be diving into the same levels over and over to complete them differently each time. There isn't too much of this if you just want to see the end of the game, and there's a newly-added option to greatly reduce the number of medals needed to get to the end if you're seriously allergic to replaying. But it should also be said that JYDGE's soul is in experimenting and discovery, and the changing objectives and layouts are designed to push you out of your comfort zone to see the depths that the game's design offers.

Among twin stick shooters, JYDGE is in a class of its own. Its design boldly tries to swing with the greats while still keeping the roots where it came from. If you want a twitchy shooter where you also flex your brain, or if you just want a break from your typical roguelike-shooter/high-score-chaser/whatever, this is well worth your time.