Ride to Hell: Retribution -Ps3- 1

August 2, 2024

I played Ride to Hell: Retribution this week because I wanted a good laugh after hearing that it was one of the worst games ever made. I just finished my playthrough on “Badass Biker”, which is the medium difficulty setting.

The story follows Jake Conway, a tough-as-nails veteran returning home to his family after fighting in the Vietnam War. While at a concert with his younger brother Mikey, a rival biker gang confronts them to pick a fight. They slit Mikey’s throat and shoot Jake multiple times, leaving them for dead. Jake somehow survives (without any explanation at all), and then teams up with his uncle Mack to exact revenge and find out who gave the order to have them killed.

Ride to Hell: Retribution breaks new ground in how bad writing and voice acting can be in a videogame. Characters mumble to themselves and speak in the most awkward manner. It’s hard to follow what they are saying, and many scenes are nonsensical. The voice acting is the worst I have ever heard. It sounds like the actors were intentionally trying to do a poor job. There are many moments in the story where someone gets killed, and the actor reads their line with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. It is so awful, that it is hysterical.

This is the worst storytelling I have ever seen in a narrative-centered game. The machismo family values and camaraderie between Jake and his brother and uncle come off as cheesy and trite. All the gang members of the Devil’s Hand are ridiculous with their inept performances and phoned-in lines. The women in the game are used exclusively as sex objects. Jake beds just about every single girl he meets in the game. They even do it with their clothes still on, which looks even more outrageous. This all feels like the worst B-movie you have ever seen.

The gameplay consists of slipping and sliding down the highway on your motorcycle, button mashing your way through hand-to-hand combat, and duck&cover shooting segments with endless hordes of idiot bullet-sponges. Every aspect of the gameplay is done horribly, with frequent glitches sprinkled throughout.

Motorcycles do not crash in this game, they bounce. The driving controls feel wonky and slippery, and speeding into oncoming traffic has little consequence as your bike will just bounce back like rubber. The physics here are a joke, and don’t represent actual driving at all.

When you are on foot, brawling with enemies feels clunky and stiff as a board. You just block, punch or kick back, and occasionally Jake rages and gets prompted into a quick time event. It’s all very simple and repetitive, and gets old really fast. You can also pick up melee weapons, but they work the same exact way as your punches and kicks.

The shooting segments are a cheap knockoff of Gears of War, but with brain-dead enemies. The henchmen will often run towards you mindlessly, or even just stand still right in front of you and not do anything until you fire at them. They can be annoying in greater numbers, especially with how they absorb seemingly dozens of bullets if you hit them in the body. These are the biggest bullet sponges I have seen in a shooting game. They are worse than zombies, and you have to land a headshot to get rid of them in one or two hits. With how many of these mindless minions come pouring out of almost every corner, the missions take a long time to finish.

The game is also loaded with technical issues. Every single time you die, you are treating to a 20-30 second loading screen before you can start again. Sometimes there are frequent checkpoints on a mission, and other times not so much. It gets extremely frustrating when you have to repeat multiple sections over and over if a bunch of enemies swarm you. The character models and graphics are also butt-ugly and littered with pop-up as the game struggles to load textures.

Ride to Hell Retribution is one of the most aggressively bad games ever made and probably the worst game of the seventh console generation. The gameplay is garbage, the writing and voice acting are atrocious, the misogynistic undertones and lewd sex scenes are disgusting, and the whole game looks and feels like trash. 1 out of ten. One can’t help be amused by how terrible it all is, so it might be worth playing just to see how absurd and godawful a game can be.