*Review based on Playstation 3 version
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RIDE TO HELL: RETRIBUTION leaves you in awe in the most negative way.
Frame rate drops, unrendered assets, clipping, game breaking bugs, glitches, and broken controls happen all the time when we play games. Fallout 4 has some pretty bad frame rate drops. Sometimes you load into Red Dead Redemption and it takes some time for the ground to become detailed. Kingdom Hearts can have some pretty janky controls that aren’t as smooth as you wish it was.
Even so, they don’t distract from the overall experience. These things are like getting pebbles in your sandals. It happens from time to time but you move on. Ride To Hell: Retribution, on the other hand, is a flash grenade being blown up in your hands. All the problems that are listed happen repeatedly and sometimes, simultaneously.
At first, all these errors seem comedic and you can’t help but laugh. Then you realize that the entire game is going to be like this. It’s like if you’re going on a hike that’s being led by someone. He trips a couple times and you can’t help but smile or giggle. As he keeps tripping over himself, you realize he’s blind and you feel bad. Then after awhile, you realize that you’ll never get to the end of the hiking trail at this rate and so you get angry and frustrated.
That blind man is this game.
Ride to Hell: Retribution is plagued with technical issues. The loading times aren’t long but the question isn’t how long the loading times are, but what exactly is loading during these loading screens? More often than not, either the level textures or the character textures will not load in when the game resumes from the loading screens. There are cutscenes where Jake Conway, our protagonist, talks to a character and that character will not have properly loaded in. The lack of any details on the character model could last up to a minute before all the textures pop in. This means that you’ll be speaking to someone that looks like a blob with eyes and a mouth rather than a human being. Other times, the desert outside the roads you drive down are completely smooth because the textures haven’t loaded in so it looks like you’re driving past gigantic piles of cake batter.
That being said, when everything is properly loaded in and looks the way the designers intended, it is still no marvel to behold. The characters look like Guitar Hero rejects (and I’m talking about the first Guitar Hero [not even the PS3 Guitar Hero’s]) and the overall level design is poor. Not only is the level design poor but it also just doesn’t make any sense. The highways you drive down are littered with abandoned cars and huge cargo 18 wheelers parked perpendicular to the road to force you to go around or slide underneath. This would be logical if it were an abandoned highway but there are always cars driving down the same road so it makes no sense how the driving sequences were designed.
The sound quality of the game has no redeeming value either. The voice acting of the game is just lazy. It sounds as if the actors just didn’t care while they were reading their lines (they most likely drew their inspiration from the cardboard box they recorded in). There is no feeling behind any of the delivered lines. It’s almost as if everything was being sarcastically delivered with little to no emphasis on the emotion. It’s not so much, “(PURE, UNINTELLIGIBLE, HATE-FUELED ANGER)” as it is, “Gee, I’m angry! I need to sound to it! Argh!” Jake Conway’s “Rage Mode” yell sounds like a grunt that we all make in the restroom after a meal that went right through us. The music is also pretty bad. One track from the game’s soundtrack is just an instrumental version of a Nirvana song that has been tweaked just enough for the game development team to not get into legal trouble.
Sometimes, despite looking and sound poorly, a game can control well. Ride to Hell: Retribution is not one of those games. For a game that is centered on M.C.s (Motorcycle Clubs), controlling a motorcycle is the most difficult aspect of this game. Accurately controlling yourself in a motorcycle segment is an impossibility. Rather than swerving from lane to lane to just barely dodge incoming cars and obstacles, it becomes a ping pong table of either just barely missing an obstacle or literally bouncing to and fro. It just doesn’t feel like a motorcycle; it feels extremely heavy.
The on foot segments are not any good either. Aiming a gun in a firefight is difficult and the fighting sequences feel like an extremely early build of a Batman: Arkham game or Sleeping Dogs. It’s extremely unpolished but more times than not, it’s easier to run up to an enemy and beat them to death rather than shooting them.
Both the driving and on foot segments are extremely repetitive. Once you play the first two levels, you’ve played the entire game. There is very little variety. Drive from point A to B while you fight off enemy bikers and then on foot segments you go from point A to B and fight the same exact enemies. Granted, most games fit this description but Ride To Hell: Retribution makes you feel it.
The literal elements to Ride to Hell: Retribution are just as bad as its technical aspects. The game is basically about Jake Conway on a quest to avenge the death of his little brother, Mikey, by killing the entire Devil’s Hand M.C. That is literally it. There is no characterization for any of the characters so when someone dies you feel no remorse, guilt or sense of accomplishment. They die and you move on. The same feeling goes for the main characters like the protagonist Jake Conway. The writing gives you no reason to support him besides the reason that you are playing as him and therefore it is your objective. The game tries to create suspense but it is done so poorly that you don’t even care by the time the revelation comes.
The treatment of women in the game is also extremely negative. Every woman that comes into contact with Jake is treated as a sex object. Exaggerated helpless hourglass figures walk into a scene, Jake helps them, Jake has sex with them, Jake leaves them. Sometimes they give him valuable information for purely video game reasons but that reason alone is not enough to justify their treatment in the game. Not to mention, the sex scenes are also done poorly. Jake has sex with all these women…with their clothes on. They try to position the cutscene game camera above the waist but sometimes, you catch a glimpse of the jeans still on the woman having sex with Jake. Plus, like plenty of the scenes in the game, most of the sex scenes add nothing to the overall experience.
The original idea of this game being an open world 1960s biker game just makes the execution of Ride to Hell: Retribution look far worse because the original idea had potential. An open world 1960s biker game that would give insights into the world of motorcycle clubs that became this abomination is extraordinary. The game had its difficulties in the development which makes sense but it would have been better off staying in developmental hell, where it could have died with dignity, than being released upon the world.
CONCLUSION/RECOMMENDATION:
Ride to Hell: Retribution should be avoided like the plague. Paying any amount for a game this awful would be a rip off. You’ll laugh at the game for the first hour but after that it simply becomes enraging. Save your hard earned dollars and watch a play through on the internet. If you’re looking for a good biker game, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned is the way to go.
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