[Summary: WTF out of 10]:

 The best that I can tell is that you’re a guy who recently got out of the armed services,  your dad was at some point involved with a motorcycle gang and is presumably dead, and you’ve gotten your little brother killed because you wouldn’t answer a stupid question on where he got the cut he was wearing. Then there’s some riding around on a motorcycle and some fighting.

The website for this game says (and I quote)

Ride to Hell: Retribution is a no holds barred brawler set in the tumultuous age of the 1960’s. A lone rider, Jake Conway, is locked in a battle to the death against a ruthless gang of bikers called The Devil’s Hand. Jake will employ any means necessary to enact his vengeance: weaponizing his environment, using hand-to-hand combat on foot, and battling it out in high-speed shootouts on Jake’s custom hog.

It also claims there’s tactical biker action, but I don’t think that they know what the word tactical actually means.

What It’s Like:

Imagine if you were having the absolute worst day of your life. Everything is going completely wrong for you at every turn, maybe you’ve lost your job, your car’s been impounded because it looks like a drug cartel member’s vehicle, you’ve been picking fights with the people you care about because you’re so frustrated, your dog won’t even look at you, just all around shit from every angle. Then imagine that you’ve tripped and fallen and gotten your hand caught in an industrial blender. It turns on. Your hand is obliterated. But you decide to immediately embark on your lifelong dream to learn calligraphy anyway, and attempt to use your raw and bloody stump to hold a dainty quill and manipulate intricate lines.

That. That is what this game is like.

 

Quickly, I note:

I haven’t ever before purposefully purchased a game knowing from the outset that it was going to be bad. This one happened because reviews I read about it being bad stated that it was hilariously bad. So I was expecting some amusement to come of it. Some. Anything. I can accept that I brought this upon myself, and I deserve every pain I experienced in playing. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to take this time to complain adamantly about my self torment.

The Great:

 There’s nothing great about this game. There are no redeeming features. There’s nothing within that box, contained on that disc, that is great. Not even the horribleness is great. I mean, there’s a great amount of horribleness, but it’s not amusing. This game actually pissed me off it was so bad.

The Good:

It might, quite possibly, maybe, have a slim-but-faded possibility of being more amusing if more alcohol was involved during the playing of it. Perhaps. And I just may, someday, when I have forgotten how much I hate myself for buying this game, get really really really really really drunk and play through the whole thing. Maybe.

Also, some of it is actually nice to look at.

The Bad:

Where do I start?

 It’s bad from the very beginning. There’s no tutorial, there’s no gentle guiding into what you should be doing, you’re just plopped out into the middle of everything with no explanation. Sometimes this can be fun, when the game is designed in such a way that you get to discover things alongside your character. Ride To Hell was not designed in such a manner. It was made so that you, as Jake, already have a firm grasp on life and are jumping right into the thick of things. You’re a military guy, after all, highly trained. Supposed to be a real badass.

Except, for some reason, you can’t acquire a revolver on your own and have to prove yourself to some military contact that isn’t EVEN YOUR CONTACT. You had to meet him through somebody else. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE!?

Which leads up to my next point. Very little of this game makes any sense. Just from a story point of view. Not even getting into the mechanics of the game or the graphics or any of the rest of it. The story makes absolutely no sense. At all. It jumps around from one thing to the next with no attempt at all to cover up any plot holes. And those holes are gigantic. You couldn’t avoid tripping and falling into them if you had magical super powers of hole avoidance.

Then we get into the way the game looks, which is fairly horrible. The backgrounds are rendered nicely, but that’s about the only good thing about looking at the game. The character voiceovers don’t sync up with the way the mouths move, things float that shouldn’t float, heads are see through, ears are blocky, I don’t even know what happened here. It’s like the programmers took two full years to create the setting, and two weeks to do the rest of it.

The mechanics for the game, the controls, are horrid. There actually isn’t an insulting enough word for how I feel toward the control scheme. Or the way that it “worked”. I cannot, by myself or with the aid of a thesaurus, combine letters in the correct order to construct words that would aptly convey my deep and festering loathing toward the vile mechanics implemented here. It all falls woefully short.

I played for a little over an hour, and I think that was too much time given to a game that I spent too much money on.

 

Conclusion [WTF out of 10]:

 

How…

… why….

…

I can’t even.

 There’s a point where you’re having sex with a woman, but both of you are dressed. And not only are you dressed, but she’s wearing a full mechanic’s jumpsuit. It defies every law of the natural world that exists. If this was the biggest issue of this game, it would still be too huge to ignore.

 

Special:

To give people a way to see this game without having to buy it for themselves or have it in their own homes, or taint their gamer profile forever by accidentally getting achievements that cannot be erased and thus marking their shame with a bright red letter on their forehead (not chest, this is permanent, forever, until the Elder Gods come and cleanse us all in torment and agony), the Gentlemen and I got together and made a Let’s Play video. You can watch us all experience the game for the first time, and know our pain first hand as we feel it.

The camera was having a bit of an issue staying awake, my personal thought is that it was trying to kill itself so it wouldn’t have to keep recording, so the video is not fully continuous as I had been hoping it would be.

Still, I hope that it brings amusement, and our suffering brings enlightenment. Or at least some giggles.

Enjoy.