Brief impressions from playing Lost Judgment

The continuation of the detective turn of the Yakuza series arrived at the editorial office relatively late, so unfortunately we cannot offer a complete review yet, as we have only the first few hours in the game behind us. On the other hand, we can confirm that the game on PS5 runs perfectly smoothly, it looks a bit better than the solid previous part, the new plot is properly interesting and the new game mechanics fit well into the overall impression.

To some extent, if you played the first game, called simply Judgment, you would feel as if you were continuing smoothly to where the original game ended. Lawyer and detective Yagami and his partner Kaito, a former member of the Yakuza, survive from the not-so-busy work of detectives in the streets of the traditionally wild city of Kamarucho. It's December 2021. Their first case in the new game involves watching a suspicious young man who invited a girl from a date on a date to an overpriced club, where she was eventually forced to pay an unreasonably high bill. Of course, you can also bounce back to all sorts of pastimes, for example, right from the start you have a TV in your office with fully emulated games for the Sega Master System.

Right during this first case, you will try virtually all key game mechanics, from traditional fights and scene investigations, including searching or photographing evidence, through improved tracking and chase mechanisms (with more significant QTE interactivity) to new stealth passages or climbing and handcuffing. buildings. Of course, there will also be combat, where in addition to fighting styles from the past, such as Crane (for fighting groups of opponents) or Tiger (for fighting one on one), you will also get access to the new Snake fighting style, designed for well-timed counterattacks. Again, you can set the difficulty from almost complete automation to a hardcore precision thresher, requiring great perception.

As you chase Casanova's baked-in online dating sites, the central plot of an extraordinarily strange murder slowly unfolds in the background. It all starts with the discovery of an unknown mutilated corpse in a fake fire (using arrows stacked on the ground from burnt smokestacks), which strongly resembles the drastic scenes of murders in the movie Seven. We then move to the courtroom for a seemingly unrelated interrogation of a former police officer accused of touching women in the subway. However, when the verdict is due, the defendant grins and instead of speaking in his defense, he admits to the whole court that he is responsible for the mysterious murder and that after four years he finally avenged the death of his son. According to the official trailers for the game, the main characters face a difficult decision between keeping the law and fulfilling justice.

Among other things, the game, thanks to its relatively limited scenery, can afford to concentrate maximum performance on the details and animations of the characters, so that especially the faces look absolutely amazing again and in some cases downright photorealistic. The animations themselves are a slightly different case, because, for example, the fights are intentionally exaggerated with spectacular grips in the style of traditional Japanese threshers. During combat, of course, you can bounce off walls again, use chairs and other objects in the environment such as weapons, etc. SDS in combination with adjustable power mode (instead of resolution) helps the game achieve great speed and fluency during transitions between scenes or from reconnaissance to combat, which is stylishly decorated with special effects and stylized UI. If you like the Yakuza series and you liked the heroes of Judgment from the last game, you will feel at home here.

The game is released on September 24 for PS4, PS5, X1, and XSX | S, you can order it in Xzone.