VERDICT-9 — Four missions, one enforcer and a hacking puzzle on every door

What is VERDICT-9 — Four missions, one enforcer and a hacking puzzle on every door

VERDICT-9 is a twin-stick shooter with a puzzle bolted to every locked door, and the doors are the objective. You are a cybernetic enforcer with a directive shell, a targeting grid and an ethics module that has been removed, working four missions across a city that has stopped asking questions. Each mission wants you to disable a set of security locks and reach extraction, and each lock opens a terminal.

The terminal puzzle is a rotation lock against a clock. A grid of relays sits between a SOURCE and a CORE, and you rotate them until power runs the whole way. Left click turns a relay forward, right click turns it back, and a feedback timer counts down the whole time; running out fries your plating for real damage. Between missions the Armory sells six upgrades for the scrap you collect, and a directive screen offers one of three permanent modifiers that you keep for the rest of the run. The four missions are hand-built — a dockyard, a refinery full of volatile vats, a walker that has to be brought down, and a spire.

How to play

1. Move with WASD and aim with the mouse. Hold the left button to fire, and reload before you need to: an empty magazine in the open is how most runs end.
2. Dash phases your servos for a blink of invulnerability. It has a cooldown, so it is an escape from a closing gap rather than a way to cross a room quickly.
3. Press E at a terminal to start a hack. Left click rotates a relay forward, right click rotates it back, and the feedback timer keeps running — a failed hack costs integrity, not the mission.
4. Spend scrap at the Armory between missions on plating, speed, fire rate, damage, magazine size or reload, and pick one of three directives. Directives are permanent for the run.

Strategies that work

• Shoot the volatile vats, not the people standing next to them. The refinery mission puts enough vats in every room that a single well-placed round removes a group, and a chain of vats does far more damage than your rifle. The enemies path around cover; the explosions do not.
• In the hack, right click is the shortcut. Every relay is at most two turns from any orientation if you use both directions, and four turns if you only use one. Players who never touch the right button lose roughly half their timer to the long way round.
• The Custodian walker turns slowly, which is its only weakness and a complete one. Circle it in one consistent direction and it spends the entire fight catching up to where you were; reverse direction and you give it a free shot every time you cross its front arc.
• Buy the extended magazine before anything else. More damage per bullet does nothing while you are reloading, and every other upgrade is smaller than the three rounds that let you finish a group without stopping. Quick-eject is the second buy, for the same reason.
• Route the score, not the kills. The final score counts hostiles down, but time matters more across four missions, and the scrap you save by clearing fast buys upgrades that make the next mission faster still. Clear the locks, take the extraction, and leave the stragglers.

A little history

The armoured enforcer with a list of directives is a science-fiction idea about what happens when judgement is handed to something that cannot exercise it, and games usually turn it into a power fantasy. VERDICT-9 keeps the fantasy but puts a lock on every door, which changes the pace: the shooting is loud and fast, and then everything stops and you are looking at a grid of pipes with a timer running. That alternation is the design. It also solves a problem specific to top-down shooters, which is that they have no natural place to put a difficulty spike other than more enemies. Here the spike is a bigger relay grid and a shorter timer. In the daily challenge the three directives offered after each mission are drawn from the day's date, so everyone builds from the same options.

Frequently asked questions