Ride to Hell: Retribution Review

Ride to Hell? Damn Straight

Rarely do I play games that leave me absolutely speechless after I’ve completed them. They either have to be really, really great…or really, really bad. Ride to Hell: Retribution is really, really, really abysmal. When I finished it I felt as if I had committed a crime. It’s the most dumbest and emptiest game I’ve played in quite some time.

Story/Concept

Is centering a game around the biker culture of the 1960s a good idea? I suppose so. Rockstar could take that idea and turn it into something great. Eutechnyx has not done so with Ride to Hell. Not one single scene in the game can be taken seriously thanks to a combination of technical issues and unbelievably terrible writing. This is a story in which women respond to a man assisting them with sex every time. It’s embarrassing.

Jake Conway is one of the worst protagonists from any form of entertainment in history. He is supposed to be a hero, but he’s an awful human being, responding to violence with even worse violence. He murders cops, sells drugs and treats every woman he comes across like a sex object. His haircut is awful. His hands are bigger than his face. He sucks more than a black hole.

“Oh my God, I don’t have a tongue!”

Gameplay

Not one single thing about Ride to Hell is fun. I would describe the driving sequences as “getting from point A to point B”, except there is no point B. They consist of riding until a loading screen pops up. Oh, and there’s some button-tapping also. Tap a button repeatedly to knock an enemy off a motorcycle. Yippee.

Well, how about the racing? This is a motorcycle game, so it must have some racing in it, right? It does, and it’s like diarrhea racing out of Jabba the Hutt’s ass after he consumed 25 million jalapeño peppers. The racing missions are incredibly easy if the controls are functioning properly and merely irritating if not. At least one of the opponent AIs wrecked during every race and exploded (that’s right, exploded), dying and making the missions even easier.

There’s some combat, right? Ride to Hell was originally an open-world game before it was cancelled in 2009 (I miss 2009), so yes. Get ready to be bored. Prepare yourself for tedious button-mashing against enemy after enemy after enemy. Pray that your punches actually connect. Do you like quick-time events? Then you’ll still hate Ride to Hell, which is filled with them.

Revolver Ocelot would be truly proud.

I can’t remember having experienced worst gunplay in a game in years. Jake frequently dies after two shots from a pistol, yet is a bullet sponge for shotguns. Ride to Hell encourages sticking to cover, but it’s pointless since the enemy AI is considered royalty on Planet Terrible Enemy AI. They run around spouting lines like, “Two words: f@#% you!” and shooting at nothingness (like in the picture above). I scored headshots easily on nearly every enemy I came across. The game’s attempts at being “challenging” by causing Jake to inexplicably die every now and then are just hilarious.

Get ready for this to happen. A lot.

Graphics & Sound

Ride to Hell is literally one of the worst looking games of this generation. The level design can’t be described as “boring”. It’s an insult to boring level design. It can, however, be described as “brown” because it sure is brown. Brown everywhere. Brown on the buildings. Brown on the characters. Brown.

The brown surfaces often lack any sort of textures. The brown character designs are hideous, with characters having brown hands and brown boobs that are larger than brown Christmas hams. More bugs exist in Ride to Hell than in the world’s largest brownie that’s been sitting in a brown swamp for three weeks. Jake’s motorcycle often falls right through the brown environments, and then I saw a lot of blue. Blue everywhere.

Ride to Hell froze on me over 20 times. It got to the point where it was unbearable and I almost just stopped playing it. It happened so many damn times that I expected each and every brown loading screen to never go away, requiring me to restart my console. Hey, at least I know the power button on my Xbox 360 works.

Yeah. This actually happens in the game

The brown cutscenes inspire the kind of laughter that other, more intentionally funny games only dream of. The facial animations are hideous. Most of the time the only part of the characters’ faces that moves is their mouth. Their faces display less emotion than Joan Rivers’. During sex scenes characters remain fully clothed, which is, not to sound perverted, inexcusable, and a sign of complete laziness on the part of the developers. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed more than I did during a scene in Ride to Hell in which two characters are shown humping while they’re both wearing pants.

Don’t even get me started on the voice acting. I truly believe the developers went to a middle school and grabbed a bunch of teenagers and said, “We’re making a game, and we’ll pay you all $5 each to be in it! Now, try to talk like an adult!” The acting isn’t even worthy of a Razzie Award. It doesn’t deserve any kind of an award. The actors deserve to never act again.

Rock music blasts in every level because OH YEAH, LOUD ROCK MUSIC! THIS GAME IS SO MUCH BETTER NOW! Not one bit of thought or effort was put into creating Ride to Hell‘s soundtrack. Imagine listening to the menu music of a WWE game for 10 hours while sometimes taking a break. Imagine bashing yourself over the head with a frying pan while watching Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and walking through a landfill full of aluminum cans.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

X 1,000,000,000

Ride to Hell: Retribution shouldn’t have been released. It’s the kind of game that makes the entire video game industry look bad. Games shouldn’t be like this in 2013. There’s no excuse for this crap. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I…God. GOD, it’s so bad. Now excuse me while I go and shower.

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