By now it's clear that Williams's Dredd isn't really my thing, but it's very, very good comics all the same.
I find myself in the same boat here, though it's offset by the current rotating gaggle of Dredd writers and their offerings being pretty strong, IMO, even when doing plots we've seen a million times before ("it's a figure from your past that we've never seen before, Dredd -
and he'll only speak to you!"). Williams' characterisation of Dredd reminds me a lot of the Millar years, and Frank's observation about Giant's original personality as an angry yoot is probably the only interesting thing I got out of this, even if Wagner and the other Dredd writers moved Giant past that characterisation long ago.
Scarlet Traces - ace stuff. I could take or leave the previous stories, tbh, but this is cracking along, and I'm loving seeing Dizzy spread his wings a bit, especially the use of graded tones in place of solid blacks, which has been noted by others as being reminiscent of Cam Kennedy's colour work.
Kingmaker - well, I liked the basic idea of a base D&D party fighting aliens, but I think this is too much of a pastiche for me now and often feels like box-ticking. Callbacks to other Edgy works don't help, but it's not actually bad or anything, just... by the numbers.
Terror Tale - didn't work for me. Intriguing setup and some of the way it played out was interesting, but it's not the lack of a sting that sinks it, it's that nothing of the interesting stuff gets to pay off.
Max Normal - I don't think I can recall a single "wacky" recurring character from Dredd that I ever actually liked and that most certainly includes Max, so this was always going to be a tough sell with me and I didn't think I'd enjoy it at all, but here we are. A lot of writers make the mistake of assuming being mean-spirited is the same as being funny - and boy oh boy do I have years of blog posts to prove it - but this, I think, hit a sweet spot between performative misanthropy and character comedy that a lot of comics writers these days seem to find elusive. I do hope we see some more.