Videogame Review: ‘Rough Justice ’84’

Having played through Rough Justice ’84 I find myself puzzled as to how I actually felt about the game. The ’80s vibe is interesting, as is the at-times corny storyline, but the core gameplay elements range from addicting to broken and obtuse.

Set in the 1980s, Rough Justice ’84 from developer Gamma Minus center’s around former “super-cop” Jim Baylor, recently vindicated and freed from prison. Jim rejoins society as it is facing a dark turn: Crime is at an all-time high, and the government has given private law enforcement agencies unprecedented power.

A Strong Story

Joining a friend’s agency, Jim is almost immediately flung into a larger-than-it-seemed conspiracy involving biker gangs, crooked politicians and even Nazis infiltrating the city. Recruiting numerous freelance operatives Jim and his partners need to uncover the corruption facing their city, corruption that even ties back to his false arrest from years ago.

The story is probably the strongest aspect of the game, which features full voice work and a mix of static and animated cutscenes. The plot plays out in a satisfying way even when the gameplay gets in the way. Unfortunately the gameplay is the engine that drives the experience and it leaves something to be desired overall.

At the core of the game you hire an ever-growing pool of freelancers and accept assignments from various contacts. This is done at the HQ and then each mission is selected on the board game-style map screen, allocating agents to each task.

Flawed Design

With all the ad-hoc assignments from various contacts and plot missions, Rough Justice ’84 can seem overwhelming when the map screen fills up with cases. This is further compounded by the game automatically leaving pause after every choice is made.

As time flows, when agents are traveling to locations it can get confusing when you’re focusing on upgrading an agent or choosing what to buy from a vendor. This is because at times, if the pause is not activated, missions can fail if an action is not chosen immediately.

When an agent hits an assigned location you need to activate them with a button press that gives you a choice on how to proceed or a directive to start a mini-game. The choices rely on skill checks that hinge on an agent’s skills in certain attributes, and the mini-games are various puzzles or memorization tasks.

This is where Rough Justice ’84 starts to stumble. The vibe and storyline is interesting as are the characters encountered, but the skill-based checks and mini-games are flawed in their execution due to basic design mistakes.

First off, there is no way to check if an agent has any skills that will meet the assignment before it’s accepted. There were many moments I had to auto-fail because the agent I sent had low or no stats in the required skills, making three successful rolls impossible.

Roll With It

Yes, I said rolls. When a skill challenge comes up either a certain amount of successes are needed (four to six on a six-sided die) or a run of numbers is needed. Much as in Yahtzee, you roll and assign the dice to the action. Things like buying extra die with action points or items can add more dice to be rolled.

Small quibbles like not knowing skills needed and the system not automatically allocating winning dice when rolled make each roll clunkier than it needs to be. The system is fun at its heart, but is made frustrating at times due to odd design choices.

The mini-games are quite interesting at first, but range from incredibly simple to frustratingly hard and there is no way to know what mini-game will be encountered while exploring. This makes taking certain assignments a tad annoying and some story missions fail unnecessarily when mini-games are part of the challenge.

Odd design decisions like not automatically pausing when editing an agent, not moving directly to an upgrade screen during a level-up, or the pure silliness of gatekeeping story missions behind leveling up contacts ultimately take some of the fun out of Rough Justice ’84.

Despite all of my quibbles I did find myself playing the game far longer than I expected each time I booted it up. The recruiting and assigning of agents is satisfying, as is seeing a map full of tasks slowly getting completed. That plus the generally enjoyable story got my interest till the end, if tempered by frustrations at some of the mechanics.

Overall the game can be enjoyed with some patience and an eye towards experiencing what the story and interesting characters have to offer. A bit more playtesting and quality control would have smoothed over the game’s rough edges and given justice to the intended game I could see behind the grime.

We were provided a PlayStation 5 code of the game for review purposes by the publisher. Rough Justice: ’84 is available right now for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, XBOX Series X|S and PlayStation 5.