Disaster Report: Ride to Hell: Retribution (PC)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and despite the infamy afforded to Ride to Hell: Retribution now, it is still possible to see in the game something that had the potential to be good. However, it is also a stark reminder of how you can have good ideas but they don’t mean much if you can’t deliver on them. It’s little surprise that this biker-themed mature/immature action game had an incredibly long and troubled development as it fails repeatedly to deliver on all of the concepts the dev team cooked up.
This isn’t exactly a tragedy though, the heights it could have reached being much higher than the canyon it plummeted into when it came to trying to make a video game but not exactly to the point it feels like we missed something marvelous. A cornucopia of fascinating failures and baffling decisions are peppered throughout and yet you can often see the skeleton underneath that would have served a proper if plain cover shooter or biking game if the developers had the technical know-how and design chops to actually realize the content they’re promising. In fact, that unusual mix of big ideas and bad delivery can almost make it the perfect starter for someone looking to get into playing awful games.
Before The Game Hoard made me into the “guy who will play anything”, some people thought of me more as “the guy who plays bad games” and I did spend some time with Ride to Hell: Retribution as part of that. Seeing how something with thought behind it goes awry can be as compelling as playing an excellent game so long as you have a thick skin for the inevitable issues you’ll have to put up with, but funnily enough I didn’t finish the game during my initial playthrough. In fact, I stopped right at a boss named Colt who makes sure to tell you before he dies that things are far from over. In a funny way, quitting there made me have a higher opinion of the game, not because I was under some delusion about its quality, but because you can get a pretty strong taste of the many flaws the game has up to that point without having to commit to some of the less inspired missions that make up the final stretch. It still feels accessible as “baby’s first abysmal game” if you’re looking to dig into the world of terrible video games, the game at least good at being bad.
But of course this is all preamble, a broad introduction that can’t quite capture the incredible issues you’ll encounter should you feel you can handle an awful game. An experience that can be buoyed by being amused by trying to figure out what went so wrong, and yet it still makes sure to throw in the kind of frustrating and dull stretches that would ensure you won’t walk away feeling this video game was misjudged. Like the famous Montparnasse Derailment where a train engine inexplicably hangs out of the upper story of a building, learning the unusual details makes for an interesting tale, but the truth of it is not pretty and it was certainly awful to experience first hand.
And so, it is time we begin our ride to hell to enumerate the many ways this game that could have been something more crumbled in such a spectacular way it became a legend all its own.
IGNITION
Jack Conway is the star of Ride to Hell: Retribution, but before we’re really given a proper introduction to our lead, we get an unusual sizzle reel of scenes that were perhaps meant to hype us up for the action we’ll be seeing down the line. Funnily enough not everything shown in this montage crops up later, but that’s also because, between clips of future events, we are also thrust into interactive experiences before we’ve even learned the controls. One of the first scenes is a turret section that won’t appear later, the player learning their first lesson that the machine gun turrets in this game are very poor. Sure you can tear up anyone who is in your crosshairs easily enough with them, but they leave you a sitting duck and it can almost feel like enemies have increased accuracy while you’re on one. Almost any time you’re offered a turret you will find it a poor place to be, even this opening segment having enemies who can instantly kill you if you don’t shoot them quickly enough. Once you’ve gotten through this shooting section though you then do a fist-fight that won’t appear later either. Here it takes the form of timed-button presses, these quick-time events a common feature throughout but not as presented here where an entire bit of hand-to-hand combat is dealt with solely through one.
Luckily once we’re out of this abruptly presented sizzle reel we can actually learn about the game we’re about to play. Jack Conway is a soldier who was just discharged after serving in Vietnam, and while he seems to have a few hang-ups about the war when you first see him, he doesn’t seem traumatized by it at all since later down the line he’s casually killing guys and cracking quips before doling out some conceptually gruesome executions like sending a guy through a log cutter. Heading back to his home town of Dead End, Jake reconnects with his Uncle Mack who raised him and his younger brother Mikey. Mack is a bit of your stereotypical gruff older man, his face barely moving as he speaks not always because of his reserved emotions but because the game seems to struggle with facial expressions. Jake has a few he can work with and you’ll often get wordless reaction shots from him so they can show off how they can move his eyebrows and pupils to sometimes unintentionally hilarious effect, but Mack’s stone-cold countenance feels like an actual issue since its less expressive than even the main villains. This might not have been too notable if not for the fact that late in the story you find out Mack was attacked as a way to get back at Jake but the game makes sure to hide Mack’s face when you find him, obscuring it not only with camera angles but also having Jake lift a note from the attackers at the perfect angle to hide Mack’s head from view so they don’t have to work out how to give the old guy a pained expression. Mack does have one part of his head that changes though, his normally long greyish white hair changing when he gives you a ride in a few biking missions. That hairdo suddenly takes on a texture similar to cake frosting and glows with a brilliant white radiance during these portions, one of many little lighting issues no doubt causing this unusual alteration.
Mikey is perhaps the more important character though because he helps instigate the quest for revenge that Jake goes on. Mikey is wearing the jacket of his father, a former member of the Retribution biker gang, and just to make sure you know who it used to belong to, the name of the man who owned it, Toledo, is there on the front as a name tag. This makes sense for how Mikey is identified by rival bikers, but it is a bit odd when Jake later wears this jacket constantly in the story and yet will try to infiltrate groups run by these rival bikers as if he was some stranger. Jake does have different outfits so he could have worn something else like when he signs up for some bike races incognito, but instead he makes sure he’s donning his biker jacket that gives away his connection. As for why the jacket ends up in Jake’s possession, that’s because Mikey dies in the very early moments of the story, his throat slit in front of Jake and then, a few seconds later, you get a black and white flashback to the moment in case you maybe sneezed and missed it while it was happening. Oddly enough, the time between Mikey’s death and the immediate tragic flashback is meant to have the same rival bikers turning a gun on you and shooting you to leave you for dead, but the shooting is cut away from quickly so you can instead see Mikey’s throat slit once more before you then learn how you actually got shot.
Despite being shot multiple times and by guys who would normally make sure to finish the job, the next scene after the unnecessary flashback is Jake being hale and hearty and ready to start his quest for revenge. You at least get told he hasn’t fully recovered from the gunshots but Jake says he’s fine and he clearly is since he’s unscathed, but from there you start your quest to hunt down the members of the Devil’s Hand biker gang connected to Mikey’s death and later those connected to the truth about your father. The back half of the game does feel more like it’s pulling out a few too many “you thought I was the guy in charge, but it’s actually this guy” reveals, but mostly the adventure aims to send you out to hunt down the biker gang members who all at least try to have some quirk or special situation tied to them to make taking them down a bit different. One you face in a boxing tournament, another involves needing to prove yourself through a few races first, you might find yourself questioning prostitutes in a Vegas-styled area to find one guy while outrunning exploding trailers in a trailer park while on the hunt for another. Like I mentioned earlier, there are ideas here, ones that could have granted the kind of enjoyable diversity necessary for spicing up action games, but the implementation always seems to go awry. It might be something like when you outrun the combine harvester on a farm, only for that to be incredibly easy and then the game chugs and slows down as it parks and you’re meant to fist fight beside it. Unsurprisingly, a lot of these problems end up tying to the mechanics at the heart of the combat and motorcycle driving that everything draws from.
A LONG AND PAINFUL ROAD
When it’s time to put up your dukes and wallop the many members of Devil’s Hand, you’ll quickly realize your fists are a poor weapon. You have a standard button mashing combo to rely on, but even the simplest of goons is prone to defending, their block able to invalidate your attack entirely. To get around this, the game gives you a kick that instantly breaks any kind of guard save for that of the twin-chainsaw wielding boss Triple-6 (and even then sometimes it works when it feels like it), but what this means for almost every other fistfight in the game is that the enemy can be handled effectively and exclusively with kicking. Your kick will make them flinch enough you can kick them again and their block will always break should they attempt that, so you can often just get a guy against a wall or in a corner and just wait for the kick to wear them down enough they croak. Yes, the kicks are slower at taking out a thug than your punch combos… conceptually. The obnoxious amount of defending the goons will do if you try to smack them around traditionally will mean you will likely do your damage more slowly, leave yourself open to counterattacks, and the game sometimes even just has a poor job lining up your punches so even if they should have hit they’ll whiff as your lock onto your target wavers for unclear reasons. As such, it’s a good idea just to kick until you win, and this is especially damaging to the boxing tournament segment. Kicks are allowed in the boxing tournament and thus you can win the whole thing by mashing the kick button endlessly, even Meathook, the boss of the segment, not able to get around your incredible leg strength after he cheats and brings in a bat wrapped in barbed wire.
You can also acquire weapons in Ride to Hell: Retribution that deal more damage than the punches and if you are feeling saucy, smashing someone with a wrench can be a reasonably quick way to take them out despite thugs defending against some of its strikes. Weapons like the knife and hatchet can often get around blocks too, but this just brings us back to the fundamental issue that the fist fights aren’t really about fighting a fair or challenging battle but just deciding on how you wish to circumvent them. You are even given a special rage mode when you’ve attacked enemies enough which is a guaranteed kill on your target should you do the timed button presses properly. Jake is meant to look enraged when you activate it, but the facial animation fails him a little here as it instead looks a bit more like a rugged smoulder you might see from a male model trying to pull off the biker look rather than an actual enraged biker. There are other times Jake comes up a little short in his performance beyond the funny expressions, such as a moment near the end where he’s meant to be yelling in rage but his voice can’t reach that range and it sounds like the performer had to stand back from their microphone when performing it so it even loses some of its punch. Having little punch is just the truth of hand-to-hand combat as well, but luckily you can circumvent it even more once you get your hands on some decent guns, to the point I barely had to fistfight at all in the back half of the game despite there being plenty of moments set up to try and force it.
Jake can carry one pistol, a heavier firearm like an automatic, shotgun, or sniper rifle, as well as a melee weapon and an explosive like a grenade or dynamite. So long as you reliably get ammo for your pistol and automatic (since the sniper rifle isn’t very good due to touchy aiming and the shotgun doesn’t feel much better and is far more situational than the machine guns), you can start to invalidate any time guys come running towards you looking to duke it out. As long as you slowly backpedal they won’t be able to come to a halt and start throwing punches, and while at times a group might try to close in around you, it’s also not too hard to get them to line up in a row running towards you in a perfect set-up for headshots. Headshots are instant kills provided the targets aren’t wearing headgear. For some guys this makes sense, you’ll shoot off a man’s biker helmet first before you can then plant a bullet directly in his skull, but other times a bandanna around the mouth or a cowboy hat provides the same protection, and the men in hockey masks are completely immune to headshots. This does mean you instead fire body shots at the masked men, but for some reason their bodies will start to stretch and bend under the persistent assault to the point you can make them bend completely backwards or even stretch their body so far their torso looks like its floating off to the side of their still walking legs. Still, most men who run up to you looking for a scrap can just be easily plugged in the dome so you thankfully won’t be kicking your way across the southern United States, but when the opposition comes packing heat themselves… they’re still not always better.
Ride to Hell: Retribution is a cover shooter, a fact it will remind you of constantly because even when you’re not under a fire, a little banner telling you the button to press to get behind cover will appear pretty consistently across the adventure. The cover can help in some gunfights to the point it is practically mandatory for them, but this is because the enemy gunmen come in two flavors: hilariously incompetent and surprisingly deadly. It’s not always tied to the weapons they’re using, it just seems to decide to be harder at times. The incompetent gunfights are more numerous, as in you can literally stand out in the open and multiple gunmen still won’t be too much of a threat. Many a time you can even just stand completely still, slowly line up your headshots, and not worry about the incoming fire too much either because it’s not hitting often enough or your automatic recovery will undo whatever injuries you take. Ride to Hell: Retribution uses the style of health where you don’t know how much you truly have, but as you get hurt more the screen darkens until finally it’s too much and you keel over. Some time away from being hurt will help you recover, but there are some instant kill situations like if you stand right on top of a stick of dynamite as it goes off. Taking a rocket-propelled grenade to the face though, you can walk that off with just a bit of dizzy movement after.
There isn’t too much to find fault with when it comes to the design of shootout locations though, the cover abundant and likely something that would have suited a run of the mill cover shooter nicely. There is some flagrant reuse of locations, the game trying to pass off the same private residence as two different locations without actually changing it visually between reuses, but at other times it’s not so scared to tell you that you will be heading back to the same location so the subterfuge feels strange. Even odder is that the bike segments pull the same trick at times even though they have a better excuse since you can’t exactly change the roads that connect spaces. Of course, the biking segments have their own host of problems, but unlike the combat it’s not something that can easily be pushed through or overcome through cheesy strategies. If you’re on your bike you’re bound to become bored and frustrated, either because you’re barely opposed on the open road or the tasks given to you while on your motorcycle don’t feel like a good match for how you play.
Driving your motorcycle controls simply enough and you’re even given some leniency in that if you crash into many things you’ll bounce off and continue to drive. At other times though if the game detects the collision slowed you too much, it will consider that a crash you can’t recover from… even if you are able to continue driving for a few more seconds after before the forced reset. This is one way the game gets around the fact that many sections include a mandatory sliding maneuver you’ll use to go under tanker trunks and fallen trees. The game will sometimes interrupt the action to do an entire devoted cutscene with a sequence of events setting up the reason these things block the road, only for you to need to press and hold a button to overcome them. You can even slide indefinitely if you like, the hindrance being you can’t turn but on a straightaway you can just inexplicably ride your bike on its side almost as far as you like. However, even with these scenes setting them up sometimes, if you’re driving at full speed you might not have time to activate the slide, and Jake will proceed to drive right through the obstruction as if it wasn’t there. The game will reset you in a moment, but not quickly enough, so it seems like you’re just fine before you’re yanked back to try it again. Sometimes after these resets the game will for some reason decide you need to be reset again, each reset damaging Jake with too many leading to your death. You end up in an odd spot where driving carefully is often not too important because you can grind against guardrails at full speed unpunished but then if you bump the corner of a stone pile in the way the game dislikes you might be reset multiple times in a jarring break of pace, but this is just the start of the driving problems.
Many biking missions are either going to be about getting to your destination while people appear to attack you, participating in a race, or trying to tail a target. The game doesn’t always justify these ideas the best, a lot of people decide they want to race you before making decisions and these are usually the easiest to complete and thus a little dull for it, and the random bikers and cops attacking you as you drive to a destination just seem to inexplicably come out of the woodwork even when you’re on the way to one of your inexplicable infiltration attempts you would think could be foiled by such a loud arrival. The tailing missions are a bit strange though as at times it doesn’t matter if you’re driving fast or slow, the Devil’s Hand member will make sure to accommodate your speed. They’ll kindly trundle along if you’re going as slow as possible or they’ll suddenly zip ahead when you activate your bike’s speed boost, but some of these trailing missions aren’t even really about catching the guy which you won’t find out until you reach the arbitrary point where the game decides you’ve been on your bike long enough. It’s hard to predict when going somewhere will involve a bike ride or just be handled with a scene transition, but the worst part about the already bland driving is when you need to fight on the back of your hog.
As you’re tearing across the street, moving freely, you might suddenly find your bike straightening out and slowing down, Jake ever so kindly matching his speed to an enemy you might not even be able to see on screen yet. The enemy biker pulls up alongside you to attack, your counter being to mash the indicated button quickly to rough them up a bit and send them careening off to their doom. Oddly enough, early in the game, the button mashing for segments like these can be handled fairly easily, but in the later bike segments, if you mash too quickly, the game won’t let you win the exchange. It seems in the later missions you need to be fast but not unnaturally so, meaning the same quivering arm trick I use to be unbeatable in Mario Party minigames actually won’t work anymore. It is actually a smart design idea to have rhythmic button pressing be the challenge instead of being a test of whether the player can hit something quickly since it can alienate some players while being all too easy for others… but it’s not rhythmic pressing here. It just wants you to find an unclear midpoint between too fast and too slow and it’s not like it’s an interesting exchange regardless since you’re just quickly dispensing with a pest. It certainly doesn’t help these late game sessions also pretty much expect you to be mashing the right button before it’s displayed, but at least there’s no penalty for pressing the wrong button so you can’t just mash everything and eventually clear them.
It’s hard to say if those weak melee exchanges are preferable to the times you whip out a firearm while on your motorbike though. Time will slow when the guys approaching you wield guns instead of wrenches and batons, making it a bit too easy to just fill them full of lead. When one has been shot enough to die, they pull off a flashy maneuver where they drive down the road, firing up into the sky which looks a bit like fireworks before they crash. Bike crashes often look very strange, some motorcycles continuing on down the road without a driver for a while or characters veering in strange unnatural ways when they realize their life is up, so again you have the eye candy of witnessing strange events while driving down unchallenging roads. However, this slowdown to let you line up shots sometimes lasts an unusually long amount of time after all targets are off-screen. Sometimes a boss character will still be left, but you aren’t supposed to kill them this early so shooting them is pointless or they might not even be visible due to dips in the road or obstructions to your view of them. You just drive in agonizing slow-mo waiting for the game to realize it needs to continue, but this is more tolerable than the times you’re riding in Uncle Mack’s sidecar. While you have no ammo concerns while firing during a driving section save reloading, your aim is normal when you’re the driver but erratic and sloppy when Mack’s in charge. This is because every movement of his bike can jerk your aiming reticle all about, making it difficult to line up shots consistently. Aiming down sights for a more zoomed in look ends up incredibly disorienting and almost nauseating, especially since it won’t have you zoom in where you left your reticle, and many times near the end of a chase while in Mack’s sidecar, you do need to hit the target with enough shots to progress. The boss characters soak up an absurd amount of gunfire with their sometimes bare flesh meaning its more of a gamble if Mack’s driving will throw you off too much to land enough shots, this definitely the biking sections at their worst when the competition was already pretty bad.
There are many area concepts that are diverse though, blasting your way through a dark mine, needing to safely reach the opposite side of a river in time to blow up a tanker truck to apparently depower an electric fence (although the group of cops standing right next to that tanke didn’t die when it blew and kept firing on me during the cutscene), and running around a foggy forest looking for drugs (which really isn’t interesting but at least you can mostly just run with all the thugs chasing behind you ineffectually as you do so). However, after this long segment you might be reflecting back on that early promise that Ride to Hell: Retribution isn’t just a game that plays poorly, but one with delightfully inexplicable design choices. Sure that intro to the game brought up some weird stuff, but now that you know the irredeemably poor playability of the game, you now have the context necessary to move into exploring the oddities that make playing through Ride to Hell: Retribution fascinating.
CAUTION: BUMPS AHEAD
While we’ll get to the wealth of technical problems and bugs like the pictured fall through the environment, we’ll start with one of the more unusual choices made about Jake Conway’s quest to take out the Devil’s Hand upper echelons. Even in the middle of a mission. Jake’s willingness to put it on hold to sleep with random women he just met is truly impressive. At times Jake can find a woman being accosted by a pimp or other ruffian and then Jake swoops in, beats them up, and is immediately rewarded by being teleported off to a private place where they can make love. Or at least, that seems like that was the intention, because while you get to witness the scene of Jake and the random woman getting intimate with each other, they don’t actually take their clothes off for it. As you watch their denim-clad bodies slap against each other, the positioning and voices making it clear that they think they’re doing something more involved than what you’re witnessing, you begin to question why this was included at all. At times you almost see the game try to hide they’re not involved in intercourse by way of a carefully chosen camera angle only to ruin it with the next view you have on the situation, but once you mentally justify this is perhaps some way to avoid being too lurid by showing full nudity, you come across the unusual complication.
At a fight in a strip club, you can see a lady dancing on stage with her top off (and seemingly just fine with you bloodily beating all the other patrons to a pulp). Her chest is completely bare, not covered in any manner, and she’s not exactly hidden either since she’s on center stage near to where the fight will start. Despite being willing to do full-frontal nudity hear, none of the ladies will so much as remove their shoes when in bed with Jake, but even odder is the fact the same character model for the stripper is also used for one of the women you take to the bedroom. She even has more facial expressions than some of the others, and yet she won’t get undressed for this alone time. Admittedly though, model reuse runs rampant through Ride to Hell: Retribution, something you’ll likely first realize when a generic male design of a guy in a white shirt with long hair appears both as random guys to punch and as various named minor characters in the plot. One of the blonde girls you sleep with even reappears later as a different character with a name who sleeps with you again and uses the same animations, although since some encounters are optional it’s perhaps most egregious with one woman who plays a slightly more important narrative role before her appearance is recycled for a throwaway paramour as well as a random prostitute you don’t bed. Not only do many of these scenes feel like they abruptly disrupt the game before thrusting you back into the middle of an incomplete mission, but they were sloppily created and that poor blonde girl doesn’t even have any emotions on her face despite being reused for such scenes multiple times, making it hard to imagine that they thought these scenes would truly excite players since they don’t seem designed to please anyone.
Beyond the awkward intercourse, Ride to Hell: Retribution is replete with many glitches that can sometimes make you wonder how they occurred. Some are pretty mundane, you might shoot a guy and his hat will decide to just float in the air instead of fall off of him. Others like hitting a piece of the environment on your bike and tumbling down into an endless void are an amusing disruption, but it’s a bit of a standard glitch found in shoddy games like this. If you do the Cook’s DLC mission though, you might encounter the most hilarious programming quirk in the bunch though. After kicking open a certain door, Jake’s body will be tipped forward slightly, and with some work on nearby stairs and other uneven surfaces, you can cause him to tip more and more. Eventually, he will tip enough you can completely invert him, making Jake walk around on his head like it was a completely natural form of locomotion. Unfortunately I could not reproduce that glitch for a screenshot despite multiple attempts, and considering the firefights and other action I’d have to slog through to try again, I hope you’ll forgive me for only describing it. Admittedly at this point it felt a bit like telling a coal miner to hold his breath and plunge into a poisoned mine to recover a lost funny keychain he told you about that would already have its impact weakened by knowing what it looked like… but lets look at it anyway since Steam user Skotose was able to get a screenshot of their encounter with it.
The already poor enemy AI can become outright oblivious to you if you stand in the right places. This can manifest as them just standing in place and doing idle animations like checking the bottom of their shoe while the gunmen beside them open fire on you, but at other times you might be able to shoot them and they’ll still be stuck standing around without a care despite you making your presence known. It can sometimes seem like they’re dumber than they are, a few times they’re firing on a gas station or Mack’s garage in missions where you’re meant to protect those locations and you’re able to walk right up to them and shoot them at point blank range in their face. At others they clearly should be coming towards you but just decided not to. Certainly one of the stranger glitches that occurred wasn’t exactly funny, but in the airplane graveyard there are areas where you need to defeat all enemies before the doors will unlock to let you move forward. The message “All Enemies In The Area Are Dead” will appear, not as an alert to you, but as a weird new attachment to Jake’s body, moving along with him even into new areas where not all the enemies are dead. This lasts until the mission is over and it moves around a bit while still sticking close to you, but it is very likely some sort of programming flag you aren’t meant to see instead adhering itself to you as a temporary strange companion until level’s end.
The music must surely be glitched out at times considering how action segments in normal areas are sometimes eerily quiet while others have the admittedly quite well done soundtrack playing. The inconsistencies across the experience make it so some moments are just going to be underscored by the sounds of gunfire, motorcycle engines, or the wet slaps of your constant kicking in otherwise absolute silence that certainly don’t match the hardcore bike image this game seems to want to build up. Funnily enough too, one of the areas I had intended to praise beyond an appropriate and enjoyable soundtrack was going to be the fairly involved motorcycle customization, but it has its problems too. While there are collectibles to get new parts and a wide range of designs and colors for almost every part of the bike, your bike can actually become too big to clear mandatory slides if you customize it wrong, meaning you’d have to quit a mission to rectify the issue. Another vehicle issue can arise during missions you’re at the wheel of a truck, where the game tells you to be careful and some people report that any contact with a vehicle will destroy the car and yet I happily wielded the mass of the truck against everything in my path and seemed outright indestructible. The line for intent and issue is blurry and hard to suss out in Ride to Hell: Retribution and yet a lot of attention was definitely put into things like populating areas with environmental details and yet so many of the gameplay basics are poorly realized. Escaping a burning barn or fighting a dynamite throwing maniac in a church could have been exciting, but nothing ever seems to work as intended. At least the failures and odd ideas can be a sight to behold as they continue to impress with the various ways they go can go awry.
CRASH AND BURN
A cavalcade of inexplicable failures awaits players of Ride to Hell: Retribution. At times enemies can decide to kill you in an instant, at others they barely seem aware of your presence as you stand right in front of them and aim your gun at their face. Your bike can easily grind against tons of obstacles and barriers in one biking section only for the next to set you back if you dare touch a piece of wood that juts out a bit too much. The plot makes inexplicable choices in presentation and even areas with promise like the music and bike customization find some way to screw it up. It is frustrating, buggy, and teeming with ideas that always go awry, the myriad of issues fascinating but too mired in problems to amuse a casual bad game tourist.
If you are aiming to dive into the depths of how poorly a game can be realized though, Ride to Hell: Retribution is still the kind of experience that consistently gives you something to critique, to be confused by, or point at as one of the problems that weighs it down. It is a glorious misfire, a compelling train wreck, and wrong in all the right ways. It shot for the stars but the bullet flew out the back of the gun, almost every aspect of the game that could be described needing a follow-up to explain how awful it was when implemented or realized. It makes the kind of ridiculous choices that you wouldn’t include if you were trying to be bad on purpose, and the intentions behind such strange moments like every scene between Jake and a woman are imperceptible due to the many confusing elements surrounding it. Undeniably awful in how it plays but surmountable because it also couldn’t handle its difficulty well or consistently, you can push through and see the game stumble through a story that just gets unnecessarily convoluted near the end as it overcomplicates why the Devil’s Hand hate your father.
There are more tolerable awful games to play, there are games that play far worse, but when making lists of the worst games ever, we rarely like to see games that are incredibly bad for boring reasons. We want a true disaster, one that isn’t some drawn out unchanging mess but one with new problems and strange designs that keep us watching. Some spectacular games will lose their shine over time, but Ride to Hell: Retribution is a special gift, a marvel we can continue to gawk at and laugh at together. This positive spin doesn’t change how agonizing the driving segments are, or how boring it is to kick your way to success, or the irritation you’ll feel when a group of gunmen decide to be incredibly competent and take you out before you even really had time to respond, but some bad memories become wonderful reflections to laugh at later once time has passed. Actively experiencing it is still something most people should avoid, there are far too many excellent games with heart and masterful design you should prioritize, but some curious people do like to leap head first into a swamp, and if you’re already making a poor choice, you might as well go with the best poor choice for a game to play.
Ride to Hell: Retribution, you’ll always be awful, you can’t be praised because of how every bit of gameplay has some fundamental flaw, and you do look bad doing it all, but hey, at least you’re unforgettable.
