Ride To Hell: Retribution Review (Ps3)

No Retribution for this Hellspawn

For a very long time, I bought games based on the box. Most of the time this paid off, and I’d end up really into games that were the most hidden of gems. Ride to Hell is the reason that I now look at reviews before I buy.

Ride to Hell; Retribution caught me at a bad time. I’d just finished watching the final season of Sons of Anarchy. I was wondering what I could use to fill the void that it left when I stumbled upon something in my local game store. It looked exactly like the program and I thought that it would be perfect. I’ve never been more wrong in my life.

The game feels like a parody of the show, as well as a parody of video games. The graphics seem so outdated for 2013, and would seem more at home as a very early PS3 box bundle game that nobody played. This game is hilarious for all the wrong reasons. It’s still riddled with bugs 3 years after its initial release, and it has been patched.

I’d talk you over the storyline, but in a game like this you just don’t want to know. It’s something about a biker feud involving the lead character who the developers seemed to spend more time on his hair moving than anything else. The voice acting would be Oscar-worthy if receiving an Oscar meant death by firing squad. One of the funniest glitches I came across turned off all the sound effects and music, just leaving the voices on show. ‘Ow!’ ‘Oof!’ and ‘You shouldn’t have come here!’ run unaccompanied just so you can hear how they sound unmasked.

The combat feels sloppy and unfinished. You can charge up punches to no avail, as even if you do they do the exact same amount of damage to your generic foes. I say generic as there are only about three different enemy character models; skinny guy with hat, big guy with bandana and big guy with hockey mask. You can even use a special rage mode, which is far too much hassle than it’s worth. Rage mode allows you to enter a quick time event, rapidly tapping the same buttons over and over to watch your character beat down on the bad guys. The gunplay is also useless, as enemies take repeated shots to the face before dying and the aiming is so awkward that it took me multiple tries to get past a shooting range mini-game on easy mode.

The combat is quite an essential part of the game; however there are optional fights you can undertake. In one of the first missions, you are in a motel parking lot and a man is mouthing off to his woman. You can beat him senseless if you so choose, leading the game into a cut scene which is recycled at multiple points of the game. This cut scene is effectively a sex scene, but both the participants are fully clothed, which makes it look chafey and odd, to say the least.

The riding is also a bit stiff, as it makes it feel like this was two bad games stapled together to try and make one half-decent game. It doesn’t achieve this, and the riding sections just feel bland like the rest of the game. You can jump, wheelie and power slide but none of them have quite the impact the developers desired, leaving you on the edge of your seat just waiting to turn off the console.

What I’m about to say may strike a bit of controversy, but Ride to Hell isn’t unplayable. The background I have is in the worst games of them all. For its time, Ride to Hell is awful – but overall it wouldn’t have been that bad 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a victim of its era. I can pick up my copy of this bad boy and still have a laugh and a pretty good time. I may be enjoying it for all the wrong reasons, but at least it’s bringing me some form of enjoyment.