Ride to Hell: Retribution Review

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I had been hearing from my friends and the internet that Ride to Hell Retribution was the worst game ever made, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. After playing this ‘game’ (if you can call it that) I boarded the hate train myself as I had experienced what no other human being should. Ride to Hell is an action shooter about bikers whose attempt to get revenge on an old enemy ends up getting an uncountable number of people killed.  For starters this game did what it said on the cover: it rode me in to the ‘HELL’ that is this just barely playable game, although in my eyes hell is an understatement. I went into the game knowing it would be bad (that was the reason I bought it) but my main mistake was thinking that it would be fun-bad, rather than just ‘worst thing in the world’-bad. It didn’t take me long to figure out that to have any kind of decent time playing this game you would need to be playing with friends, so that you can all laugh and point at the terribleness. Sadly I have no friends, so that option was not available to me! Still, I regret my decision to play this game alone more than anything that I have ever done.

The story was, in a word, pathetic. It starts off with Jake Conway, whose father is an old enemy of biker gang “The Devil’s Hand”, getting confronted by evil gang members whilst on a night out with his brother Mikey. The story unravels from there and only maintains interest by making you want to see what ridiculous thing is going to happen next. There are multiple instances of ‘plot twists’ wherein the player is introduced to a character and the game attempts to make you like them, and then they’re killed moments later. There were also attempts at making the game saucy by including sex scenes, but even sex scenes lose their novelty when they occur every two seconds and the people involved are clothed.

I had been holding out some slight hope that what the game lacked in story it would make up for in gameplay. Unsurprisingly this was not the case. There were so many faults that I don’t know where to begin.  The actual action gameplay got repetitive as every fight seemed to be exactly the same; the incessant button-mashing and the shocking attempts at quick time events quickly grew tedious. Another terrible aspect was that in cut scenes the characters’ faces would only load half-way, so I would be left to look at some sort of clay creation reminiscent of a creepy Wallace and Gromit parody. On top of this the vast majority of the game had no challenge, and whenever there was a harder section it was ridiculously difficult (such as having to get 15 headshots to kill a particular enemy).

The only non-terrible aspect of the game was its soundtrack, which managed the impressive achievement of being distinctly average. When forced to button-mash in order to kill hordes of identical enemies, at least a heavy rock song is the appropriate music to reflect your own frustration.

So the real question is, is Ride to Hell as bad as everyone says? The answer is an unequivocal yes. The terrible gameplay mixed with the poor story is a recipe for a game that should never be played by any person on this planet, or any other. The only circumstance in which this game should be played is when you and some mates want the enjoyment of laughing at something incredibly stupid, but don’t want to get beaten up by the local idiot kid’s dad. However, even with friends along for the ride (to hell) I recommend getting really drunk beforehand.

So sure enough, this game was shocking! I could not wait to be done with it and there were many mechanisms in the game that didn’t make sense, which made the whole thing a shamble. I know I wasn’t expecting much but I was still hoping to have some modicum of fun! I’m giving this game a 1 out of 10 as although it was only a fiver I still wanted to get my money back and then some for having endured this monstrosity.

Bonus Stage Rating - Terrible 1/10

 

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 3 code was provided to Bonus Stage for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to press@4gn.co.uk.

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