Judgment is a top-down society builder. In this game, the apocalypse has begun. Most of the people have been killed by bloodthirsty demons, werewolves, ghosts and much more. The hell gates have been opened to judge humanity. You and a few other survivors have escaped this fate and set up camp in a nearby forest. It is quite certain you will have to try your very best to survive and try to learn more about the occult and find a way to stop these creatures from taking over the world.
You play in a top-down perspective and tell your survivors what to do, they will have to gather resources, food, water and much more to make your society a success. The map is randomly generated and gets a seed code. If you use this seed code to start a new game, you will get the exact same map. This is a fun feature to help you conquer even if it doesn’t work the first time.
In your Base, you will find a bunch of resources scattered around. This can be trees, stone, clay, metal mines and abandoned campsites. You will have to expand your base and add more survivors as they come along. To add a survivor to your society you have to first send out a rescue squad. Then you will go to the world map view and move around. On this world map, you can come across a bunch of different places you can scavenge and sometimes you will find a survivor in need of help.
When you select a building nearby you will see how many demons hide there and equip your squad accordingly. When you have a squad scavenging they cannot help out at the base anymore. From time to time your base will be attacked by demons. There is an awareness meter on the side of your screen which will increase daily. When the meter gets too high you will have to get ready to defend your base.
Whenever your survivors are busy working in the base their quite ingenious AI does most of the work for you. You get to set priorities for every survivor. Some survivors due to their character traits will be better or worse at certain tasks than others. It’s important to use each survivor to their strengths. If you have an academic for instance, you can use him/her for scientific research. Scientific research is one of the most important mechanics of the game. You will need to gather research points by making someone do experiments. These points can be used to upgrade your base and knowledge. This way you get to build new buildings, be more efficient and even set up a strong defense for your base.
Once you get to a certain level of upgrades in the scientific program, you will need external help. You’ll have to go scavenge schools/hospitals to find research equipment. These are of course the most difficult places to scavenge. When you scavenge, you walk around the world map with your task force and click a certain location. Then you will see how many demons are present and you get to choose between going in and fighting, letting the game auto resolve the issue or cancel and go somewhere else. I’m so thankful for this auto-resolve button because scavenging can feel very grindy when you have to manually go around and beat every single demon near a shop to get the loot.
There are a few instances when you’re not able to auto-resolve, for instance when you go to a place with the main quest goal or when you have to rescue a survivor. On the world map are some other places of interest. You can find other societies. You don’t get to see their actual base, but you can go over and greet them. Then they will either be hostile or friendly. Both the hostile or friendly societies can ask you for help. If you help them your relationship will become better and if you don’t worse. When the relationship is at the worst it can be, they can attack you. But you can also attack and loot them.
Judgment is a great game with loads of great game mechanics. The AI that makes the survivors do their tasks is really cool and easy to work with. The game is not at all easy. It’s quite the opposite, very challenging. You will lose loads of your survivors and struggle to keep your society going once you’ve been attacked by a strong army of demons. But it really is fun to gather everything again and rise up even stronger than before. I’ve had a lot of fun playing this game and it’s really addicting once you get into it. That’s why I will give this a nice score and recommend it to anyone who likes survival/strategic/top-down/society builder games.