Ride to Hell is basically what happens during a bad hangover. The events of the previous night are little more than a fragmented memory, full of things you hope don’t end up being regrets as you move forward in life. Meanwhile, here, in the present day at 2 in the afternoon you’re in incredible pain, your ears are ringing, sounds don’t sound right, and anything light or colorful is painful to look at.
The first thirty minutes of Ride to Hell are a completely disjointed introduction to the narrative. It involves gunning down gang members with a minigun, watching the lead character Jake execute a few people, and ultimately jumping over a helicopter. I think… If there’s anyway to extract the developer’s intent from this sequence (I honestly don’t think there is)… This was meant to get you excited and interested in the rest of the game. I was ultimately confused, part of me was laughing.
Why a damn helicopter?
You are Jake Toledo. A Vietnam vet returning to his desert home town after three tours in the army. You find out your little brother has been getting involved with the sordid world of bands. It’s not a euphemism for anything, not drugs or gangs, but the ever so vague “bands”, they couldn’t even be bothered to make up their own band names or simply call it “rock and roll.” Bands I suppose do sound dangerous even though they’ve been around for thousands of years and can refer to near any genre of music.
You better watch out for those bands, they’re the gateway to substances.
Okay so your little brother runs away from home because NO ONE UNDERSTANDS HIM™, you chase him down, ask him if his girlfriend looks like a prostitute but ultimately find out she’s a good person because she reads “books” to go along with those “bands” and decide you and your brother need to bond over a hamburger. That’s when the Devil’s Hand shows up and decides it would be a pretty good idea to kill your little brother, because how else would the rest of the game happen otherwise? Now Jake is on a Kill Bill style revenge quest to kill each of these Devil’s Hand members that was there that fateful day. Now there’s an idea, Kill Bill, go watch that instead of playing this game. In fact here’s a list. A list of games I’d rather be playing that aren’t Ride to Hell:
The Secret World – for the better character animations.
Saints Row 2 – for the cool and mature storyline.
Tony Hawk Underground – for the driving
Rumble Roses XX – for the combat.
Final Fantasy XIV’s Beta – Pre Realm Reborn
The Guy Game – for everything.
After these two very odd and disjointed introductions to the game you get a…. Third introduction. Chasing the first member of Devil’s Hand, Anvil, and introducing you to gameplay mechanics such as…. Well…. I guess Driving and Combat are the two closest things this game has to anything that can be called gameplay mechanics. Driving is a lot like trying to roll a super bounce ball slathered in KY jelly across a waxed teflon floor. Obstacles? Sure we’ve got those, but they don’t really matter since gently bumping any part of the environment will cause your vehicle to reset and start the last portion of the mission over. That’s not usually a problem, you know, outside the whole “Our collision detection is absolutely miserable” thing, but in timed missions not driving perfectly will result in you failing them. And there are a lot of arbitrarily timed missions.
Combat is… Hold on I have to take a break for this orgy.
Where was I? Oh yes combat. Combat is pretty much all over the place, and works in the terms that you can point a gun in a specific direction and it will shoot in that direction. I know that might not sound like much to the average gamer but that’s an overwhelming achievement for this game. Enemy health pools tend to wildly vary, and weapon damage is difficult to calculate, it wasn’t uncommon for me to find a pistol that did more damage (and had better range) than a rifle. The game does detect headshots, but that’s if enemies aren’t wearing a cowboy hat or hockey mask which will grant them immunity from bullets through the skull.
The game also makes use of quicktime events which can be surprisingly fun the first ten or so times you do it, they begin to wear a little thin after that. QTE is often used to execute enemies, and in one tournament style brawl the quicktime events were almost cool. Almost. Driving also makes use of QTE as it’s the only real way to knock enemies off of you once they’ve latched on…. Theoretically. See if an enemy grabs you while you’re on your bike, and you don’t do anything? They’ll eventually let go, race off, and explode.
In fact things like to blow up a lot in this game.
Enclosure with loads of gas tanks and enemies? Enemies will duck behind the gas tanks, shoot at the gas tanks, and blow themselves up.
Chasing you down a highway? Enemies will race past you and blow themselves up.
The game decides it needs to throw a new obstacle in front of you? Something will blow up.
Cars. Bikes. People. They’ll all explode at the drop of a pin.
Or go flying fifty feet into the air, which is a thing that tended to happen as I nailed headshots on enemies.
BOOM! Headshot!
BOOM! Headshot!
After these three introductions I was allowed access to the hub world, the fact the game even had a hub took me completely by surprise. It basically consists of a gun shop, a mission board, a garage to customize your bike, and a few NPC’s that will shrug endlessly if you walk into their path.
” ‘Ey, What’re ya’ doin’? I’m walkin’ ‘ere!”
Customizing my bike was fun. I went into the garage and noticed I had two selections. My default bike “Lost Soul” and the Army bike. Lost Soul seemed to have a slew of customization options, I decided to check out what the Army Bike had…. Which somehow locked away my Lost Soul bike. The Army bike also has zero customization options, and I’ve been stuck with that and only that ever since.
I don’t want to talk about the graphics. I will briefly mention the game invented visual glitches I’ve never seen before. The music was serviceable but forgettable, it does have the coveted title of the only thing in this game they didn’t massively fuck up.
Someone explain what this even is. jay@enemyslime.com
Missions attempted to be varied. Some were centered around races, others had you raiding Devil’s Hand properties, engaging in shootouts, rescuing ladies to make sweet denim on denim love to them later. However this variety ultimately ended up being as confusing and head scratching as anything else. Such as one mission where I had to get around an electric fence. Rather than just disabling the fence locally, I guess Jake decided it would be a better idea to hijack a tanker, drive it miles away to the dam, and blow up the dam.
Yeah.
The mission didn’t even follow through on its own story as once I’d disabled the power for the entire damn region well, I was back to throwing enemies through television sets and electrocuting them to death.
Hold on sex break.
I’d call it exploitative and misogynistic, but I think I was too weirded out to consider social connotations.
The game has all the maturity of a 14 year old writing a Fast and the Furious Fanfic. Edgy things happen for the sake of showing off how cool and badass Jake is, made worse by poor animation and head scratching censorship. Such as the part where Jake left a Devil’s Hand member to burn alive… Except it was really only the guy’s jean cuffs that were on fire and he could have easily patted himself out. (Spoiler: That guy died)
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
In fact a lot of the game’s “maturity” choices are ultimately questionable. Such as the marijuana farm you burned down, though it looks more like your burned down a farm of Japanese Maples. Which makes for a more amusing narrative if you just pretend the Devil’s Hand cash flow was Japanese Maples.
There are gratuitous sex scenes. Jake can take any woman and bring her to the height of pleasure, the woman moaning and rhythmically moving her body as Jake kisses her delicate neck and wraps his hands around her supple breast. Only everyone is fully clothed.
Just as an aside, this same game with red pot plants, clothed sex scenes and censored violence also has nude models, bags of cocaine and over the top blood splatters, making the censorship not only confusing but inconsistent. Jason put it best when he said this game is rated M for Everyone.
And yes, that may look like the same woman from my orgy screenshot, but she’s not the same woman, she’s a different woman. She is the Nurse Joy of prostitutes (Prostitute is their word, not mine, I think it’s quite mean). The game has a pretty bad habit of reusing the same models for different characters. Such as Candice here… Or was she the Prostitute. I don’t remember.
However despite the confusing mix of censorship and mature themes, the disjointed narrative, the subpar combat and even worse driving, I think what gets me the most about this game is it didn’t have to be bad. All it needed was a little more polish. It wouldn’t have been Game of the Year material but it could have been playable, even enjoyable. A lot of the problems were relatively basic, adjusting health sliders or hit boxes doesn’t take a huge amount of time or resources. I even feel the disjointed narrative is a result of deep sixing one mission and jamming those elements into another mission where it simply didn’t fit.
Instead we’re left with a jumbled mess of what was left on the developer’s hard drive with a stupid tax slapped on to the cover in a last ditch effort to recover some money. I can’t even recommend it for the spectacle of how bad it is, it’s an unintentionally bizarre experience for the first one or two hours that quickly wears thin and gets straight up frustrating and rage inducing. The only good bit of this game is the form of stockholm syndrome I started to form for my blonde prostitute:
Blonde Prostitute, my best friend(s)
If you’re hard up for some biking action go play GTA IV’s the Lost and the Damned or Full Throttle instead, and try to forget this nightmare of a game exists.
Now to sign off, the dangers of an electric fence:
