The box reads Ride to Hell: Retribution - 1% Edition. That's the first clue about the aspirations of this biker adventure. Simply put it's such an awful mess that no-one should even come close enough to poke it with a stick. If we had been blessed with a percentage scale with which to score games, the grade would have wound up around the 1% mark. Perhaps even lower.
During the first minutes after turning on the game I'm treated to a biker sitting on his Harley Davidson (or rather what looks like a Harley, but without the costly license). Shortly thereafter he gets on a mounted machine gun and starts to shoot other bikers. The hero dies in a bloody attack and falls down into a great graphical glitch on the ground. He would have fallen to the ground, had it been programmed into the game.
At the beginning where not given any background whatsoever. It's straight on to the shooting, perhaps in an attempt to please an imagined target audience. It's hard to imagine fans of such brainless action, but even if you consider yourself a fan of 'dumb action' you need to steer clear of this.
Eventually we're given some kind of context in the shape of some awful cutscenes. Jake Conway's sordid tale is told in such a shoddy way, that it seems written by some kind of broken robot who's only source of inspiration was Teletubbies. This is an abbreviated version of it: Baddies kill brother, you're out for vengeance. That's pretty much it.
The road to revenge is long and boring. Ride to Hell: Retribution offers two gameplay ingredidents apart from skipping cutscenes - motorcycle riding and fighting. The driving is horrible. You travel from point A to B on rails and get to perform some drifting and wheelies at times. If you're doing well you're rewarded with points and achievements. Most of the driving is automated so you really only have to push the stick gently in the general direction in order to progress.
If you manage to resist the temptation to turn this atrocity off, then you get to experience destinations such as the Las Vegas clone San Alfonso. It's not really much better as all the cities you get to see here are ghost towns. I hear voices so I start to look for people. Naturally you cannot enter any of the buildings - not Atlas Casino nor City of Gold. It's a closed down world. And finally I locate the source of the voice to a parking lot. After a short fight you liberate a girl and as a reward you get to sleep with her. Save girls. Mount them. Sell drugs. The side missions in Ride to Hell: Retribution are truly character building exercises.
The fights consist of ridiculously boring semi-interactive Quick Time Events-junk. You're always given several seconds to make the correct button press, and you're not even penalised for pressing the wrong button. It's difficult to imagine anything as pointless as this, but at least it's bloody and brutal (sigh). When you're fighting you can activate the extra brutal Rage Mode that allows for bloody murder with knives and kitchen equipment.
As I fight I'm treated to rivers of dire blood and mud pixels. Long loading times add to the frustration and they appear in very peculiar places. Immediately following loading for instance. Two minutes worth of load screen fun directly following a load screen. It's truly a broken game.
The artificial intelligence is utterly predictable, but it also comes up with amazing things like 10 feet jumps between barrels. Most enemies are nice enough to run straight at us. Some of them can survive a ton of bullets, and not even multiple headshots with a hunting rifle seem to stop them. It comes across as broken and dumb. It's probably my least favourite part of the game, perhaps with the exception of the horrible cutscenes or the pornographic sequences that leave a foul taste in your mouth.
All of a sudden you're faced with something extremely difficult, and not meant for the player to understand. You can die 30 times straight and then succeed thanks to some accident. Certain areas where enemies ought to appear are completely empty, perhaps the game was still trying to load them in.
Ride to Hell: Retribution isn't a short game, something that becomes painfully apparent early on. Eutechnyx has made use of the chewing gum principle - make them last forever and ever in a very repetitive fashion. The levels are excruciatingly long and once completed you're rewarded with another orgy. Now with four girls.
There are limits to what a game reviewer can stomach. Ride to Hell: Retribution sure brought me to hell, and as I step away I'm confident I'll never return. Ever. Amen.