Following its release on PC earlier this year, Rough Justice ’84 brings its boardgame-inspired strategy gameplay to console. Set in a city where the police force has been replaced by private contractors, it’s your job to take on contracts, tackle various crimes, and earn plenty of money as you go.
Starting by hiring an agent, you’ll be given a number of crimes to tackle. These come in various forms: maybe you’ll be hunting down a stolen car, dealing with a security breach or something else. Rather than being a passive experience, you’ll need to be on-hand to deal with the crimes yourself in the form of a minigame. Some of them are luck-based, seeing you roll a set of dice. Others require you to solve a puzzle: perhaps picking a lock, cracking a code or piecing together an e-fit photograph.
Everything you do in Rough Justice ’84 is against the clock, so you’ll need to manage your time effectively. You’ll only have a limited amount of time to pick up a case file, and once you’re working on one, you’ll have so much time to complete it. Needing to consider your agents’ time travelling to and from various locations, plus the time it’s going to take to solve the crime, you’ll need to plan carefully if you want to succeed.
That’s not the only thing you need to consider here, either. Rough Justice ’84 is, first and foremost, a strategy game. Your agents have individual skillsets, with areas they excel in more than others. Level them up and you can improve their skills, which you’ll need to do to tackle tougher cases later on. They also have a limited amount of energy – and every action costs energy, so you’ll need to watch that you don’t run them to exhaustion.
Oh, and agents don’t come cheaply, either. Each one has a hiring fee, so you’ll need to ensure you’re earning enough to afford them. That means being successful in your cases – fail them (which is easily done) and not only will you not get paid, but the reputation of your agency is going to take a hit.
Succeeding in Rough Justice ’84, then, isn’t easy, but it is fun trying to muddle your way through the murky world of contractor-driven crime-fighting. The puzzles here are particularly enjoyable, even if some of them are a little obtuse (it took us a few failures to work out how to crack the lockpicking minigame, for example). We’ve also enjoyed the dice minigame: essentially, you’ll need to get three rolls of four and above to succeed. A simple concept, but when luck (or the RNG god) isn’t on your side, it can be frustrating to fail a case when it feels out of your control.
Getting into the full nitty-gritty of Rough Justice ’84 takes a while: it’s slow to get going, with a lot of tutorials and tooltip boxes to get through before you can really hit the ground running. Stick with it, though, and you’ll find a fun strategy game that takes a tried-and-tested board game format and gives it an engaging, interactive twist.
