Ride to Hell: Retribution Review

The setting is the one defensible thing here. A biker revenge story set in California in 1969 is a genuinely underused idea, and almost nothing else in games has tried it. It had been in development since a 2008 announcement, and the open world it was first pitched as was cut back to linear stages along the way. Eutechnyx builds five modes to tell it with and every one arrives half made.

Driving has no weight and the bikes slide across geometry. Races run on rubber banding you can watch happen. Melee is one combo repeated for hours against enemies who queue politely to receive it. The shooting sticks you to cover you did not choose. Prompts appear over cutscenes that have already gone wrong. Boss fights end early if you stand in the correct corner. Textures resolve a few feet from the camera, animations break mid swing, and on console it locks hard often enough that walkthroughs list the reboot as a step.

What sinks it past craft is the writing. The plot rewards beating a man by handing you sex with the woman attached to him, staged in full clothing because there is no animation budget for anything else, and it plays the trade completely straight. That is not an edgy misstep at the margins, it is the structure of the story. The one thing separating this from the absolute floor is that all five modes do technically run.