Rough Justice ’84 (Switch) review

I love board games. There’s nothing better than getting friends together, rolling dice, and dealing cards. In the last decade, there’s been an influx of interesting board games, powered by interesting decisions and video game inspired mechanics. Now board games are feeding back into video games in interesting ways, influencing people like Gamma Minus – the developer of Rough Justice ’84.

Rough Justice is set in a kind of reimagined 1980s, taking influences from films like The Warriors and Miami Vice. The streets are dirty, the signs are neon, and the TV is fuzzy and loud.

You play as Jim Baylor, a cop who tried to clean up the streets and ended up locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. Upon release, we find that the fictional city of Senca has enacted a new law, allowing small agencies to take up the work of cops. So, you and your buddy Hank set about cleaning up the streets and earning a bit of cash the only way cops in the ’80s knew how – rolling dice!

Here’s the gameplay loop: take on caseloads from your office, which give cases all around the city to solve. You then recruit an agent from a list. These are modeled after various characters from ‘80s TV and film and have different stats, gear, and energy points. You then click a case and assign an agent. Once at a case, there’s a choice of which stat to use, and then get to roll the number of dice that is associated with that stat. For instance, if an agent has a perception stat of 2, you get to roll 2 dice. You can use energy to add more dice, and if you roll a success, you win the mission and some rewards (usually cash and some XP). Different missions have different requirements for the dice to pass. Some might ask for dice with a 4+ roll, others might want a sequence of numbers. When agents get XP, they level up, giving them more dice. And once an agent is out of energy, you need to send them back to the pile and pick another.

It’s quite satisfying. The process of picking the agents you want to field, managing their energy, and seeing the actual dice rolls is enjoyable. You become attached to the agents that perform well, and challenges scale in a way that stops the experience going stale. You can also buy gear that stays with them, so if you don’t use it before the agent runs out of energy one time, it will be available the next time you pick them up from the pool.

Some missions require you to dispatch an agent and then complete a mini-game. This is great, because they don’t take energy, and you get a bit of cash. Unfortunately, none of the mini-games themselves are wholly inspired. Many involve matching things, or trial and error but with a bit of a police theme. There’s a particularly egregious ‘lock picking’ mini-game which is merely a case of pattern learning.  Another mini-game also points at the big downfall of Rough Justice, and we’ll talk about that later.

Story missions are also on the agenda, pushing forward the narrative and involving quite a bit of voice acting. Fleshing things out further, you’ll also get to wrestle with making moral choices. Indeed, there’s loads of stuff here, and the writing is reasonably sharp. This is a game I could see myself playing a lot of…just not on Switch. Unfortunately, this is another Switch conversion that hasn’t had a lot of thought put into it.

This was always intended to be played with a mouse, with a UI that relies heavily on cursor movement. Selecting a mission and then assigning an agent requires two clicks of a mouse on a PC. On the Switch, you must use the left thumbstick to scroll the map (or use the shoulder buttons to flip between every possible hotspot on the map), then use LT to go into the agent menu, then press LT enough times to get to the agent you want, press A to select that agent and then press Y to assign the agent. It’s simply too fiddly to be enjoyable, and it doesn’t help that if you undock the Switch, the game doesn’t support the touchscreen.

Button placement suffers from inconsistency too. Sometimes A is ‘Accept’, sometimes Y. It often presents you with a button press that isn’t the one you were expecting. Remember that mini-game I talked about earlier? It’s based on spotting sequences, and for some reason, ‘Accept’ has been bound to the B button. It took me a while to figure out what I was doing wrong.

This is made worse by the fact that missions and responses are timed. If your agent gets to a mission, but you don’t respond in time? You’ve failed the mission. Don’t get to a mission before its timer has run out? It’s marked as incomplete. On PC these issues rarely arise, effortlessly clicking around and dragging and dropping dice onto grids. On Switch? You’re constantly wrestling with the controls. Even clicking on missions is sometimes hard if there are a few missions in proximity.

Now here’s the biggie. There’s no autosave. On Switch, the convention is that your game is constantly in a state of suspended animation, so shutting down the console or game rarely means that you quit or save the game. We lost three sessions of play after the game crashed and hadn’t saved progress.

What we’re faced with here is difficult. We realise the economics of small games. Probably not much money was available for a Switch port, so I guess it was either this or nothing. But we simply can’t recommend playing this game with a controller. There are too many oversights and niggles. It’s a shame as Rough Justice ’84 has a lot going for it. I’d happily play this for hours on PC. This compromised handheld version, though, simply feels rough.

Gamma Minus’ Rough Justice ’84 is out now on consoles. It first launched on PC. Published by Daedalic Entertainment.