Rough Justice ‘84 sounds great on paper. A single-player strategy board game where you take the reigns of a fledging detective agency set in the ‘80s inspired Seneca City.
You take on the role of Jim Baylor, a cop who was wrongly imprisoned and is now needing a quick return to a working life. Thankfully, one of Jim’s old colleagues comes to the rescue with an offer Jim can’t refuse, and it’s not long before you are leading a fledgling private eye agency and hiring your first agent to complete your maiden mission.
Rough Justice ‘84 contains a myriad of systems and mechanics that can feel overwhelming at first. For example, to hire an agent, you have a selection to choose from. Each agent has different attributes, including reflexes, perception, strength, and intelligence. Each agent has a bio with a back story for you to help make your decision about their hire price a major factor in that choice. Another area you need to consider is how many action points they have. The more expensive agents usually have more action points. These are used for the movement of the agent across the map and for extra dice in some of the minigames.
There are many other involved systems at work here, from the different caseloads and the jobs they offer, the bank you can take loans from, the in-game day cycle, all the different mini games and the different tiers you will encounter as you progress, plus much more. As I said, it was quite overwhelming, and I found myself spending much of my time trying to learn and put all this into action in the first few hours. The game tries to teach you as you go, giving tips and explanations every time you start something new. Just be prepared to retain as much information as you can. It does get easier as you progress, but I did have to stop myself a few times to remember a certain mechanic.
Navigation around Seneca City is all done on a fitting neon pink map. All the jobs, important buildings, and agents are represented by pins. Scanning the map is done by using the left stick to move around and the right stick to tilt it up and down. All the characters have been given impressive detail, all fitting the era perfectly in their stationless drawings.
The game does include voice acting, and although it’s all mostly fitting for the characters, the voices seemed much louder on the map screens, jarringly louder than any other sounds, and it really sticks out. The audio quality seems to also dip, with some slight distortion. It does take you out of the moment, with none of the sound options seemingly making any difference.
The cases themselves are split into different areas depending on who you take the caseloads from. Some will involve making a choice and then rolling dice to succeed or fail the job; some will involve mini games like hot-wiring a car, matching a fingerprint on the system, deciphering codes—I think you get the picture. A couple of these games have really tight time limits, and you really have to be on your game if you want to complete them.
Although the mini games are fun to start with, they soon become quite tedious the more you encounter them, as they do recycle them often, and when you start to realise the grinding you have to do to level up certain areas, it does start to become quite monotonous, even after a few hours of play, which wears you down over the 25–30 hours to completion.
The grinding aspect comes from the people you pick the case loads up from. Each of them has a certain number of points required before they level up. These bring harder cases in the form of different tiers. To get these points, you have to complete the caseloads they give within a certain amount of time, and each person has a different amount to hit the next level. This ties into the main narrative of the game, with you needing to hit certain goals to unlock the next chapter.
And that narrative is kind of what you would expect from an 80s-inspired game. Dirty cops in the force are being governed by dirty politicians, and you and your agency are up for trying to clean up the city by getting rid of these dirty people and restoring some kind of credibility to the force and the city.
All in all, Rough Justice ‘84 didn’t really do it for me. As a big fan of Citizen Sleeper, I was excited to give this a go. But unlike Citizen Sleeper, where its narrative and simplified gameplay hooked me in, here with Rough Justice ‘84, its many involved gameplay mechanics just helped to push me away. This, by no means, makes it a bad game. I am sure there are plenty of people who will resonate with it, but there will be many others like me who will just get overwhelmed in the first few hours and nope out. There are positives to be had with its sleek presentation, great character design work, and synth-inspired soundtrack, and if you still find yourself intrigued, wait for a sale, just in case you feel you will fall into the ‘overwhelmed’ category.
—————
Rough Justic ‘84
Release Date: Out Now
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5 & Xbox Series S/X
Price: £17.99