My first assignment for this website was to review an iOS app. My second to review RIPD. I feared that, much like Ryan Reynolds I had died and gone to the afterlife, and not the good kind.
There have been very rare instances to the point of non-existence where we’ve had good video games based on movies. In fact, hearing these titles tend to fill us with dread: Jurassic Park, E.T., Street Fighter: The Movie, Ecks vs Sever, Waynes World, Jaws… Not only were these bad video games, they’re lauded as some of the worst video games of all time, and some of them are actually based on good movies!
So imagine how I felt when I found the bastard summer baby of Men in Black and Dead Like Me all wrapped up in a pretty little bow waiting for me to play it in my Steam library. A video game I didn’t know existed based on the feature film that managed to get a whopping 10% on Rotten Tomatoes as of the time of this writing.
As I loaded up the game I couldn’t help but notice the display of a series of neat black and white boxes speckling my computer monitor as it attempted to sputter to life, already a great sign of things to come. Often when human beings are faced with impossibly scenarios they fill themselves with a false sense of hope and optimism to keep themselves going. This is what happened to me when RIPD hit me with its first pulp comic-esque screen, I grew hopeful. “This won’t be so bad” I told myself “They’re not trying to recreate the movie, it looks more like a comic book, this could actually be fun.”
The fact the game didn’t bother to try and explain itself in any way whatsoever should have been a more accurate sign of things to come. My first real red flag should have been this:
This held for ten minutes. Clearly other players were as thrilled to play this as I was.
I was fairly certain the first time I’d ever become Ryan Reynolds I would be knee deep in Blake Lively ass. I was indeed knee deep in ass… Let’s see, how do I describe this a bit more eloquently? Imagine that you’re playing Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2. Only Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 are absolutely horrific in this scenario.
I would say it’s relatively standard over the shoulder shooter, only in standard over the shoulders guns do things like “tend to work” and enemies “tend to die.” Here you’re shooting a lot, and enemies are being hit a lot, and you’re being hit a lot, but nothing is dying. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from my rudimentary knowledge of filmmaking there tend to be things like “stakes.” So I find it awfully hard to believe in RIPD things would just “not die.”
That is to say, I entirely blame the tedium of shooting a lot and being shot at a lot but nothing happening on game designers who for some reason thought a herculean hit pool for everything would be a good idea. In order for guns to be fun they have to do things like actually work, I’d also like to try for a headshot that doesn’t give me six dozen “critical hits” until something finally vanishes. I found out both running and jumping/dodging were tied to the space bar, and it appears to be entirely up to the space bar which one it will let me do. From what I could briefly tell there were class roles, I’ll be damned if any are available to the player, but enemies certainly had them… reminiscent of tanks and medics, making things even harder and more annoying to kill.
I did finally manage to die, once, somehow, my UI was badly explained and nearly unreadable so I couldn’t tell if the halo over Ryan Reynold’s rugged face was my life bar or a… a something else. I didn’t so much “die” as I was left crippled with the option to press the F key to… wait for it… Suicide. A far kinder way for Ryan to go out than I had been given before having to touch this game.
I did eventually win the match. Eventually. After 30 minutes of torture and honest to goodness suicide attempts. Only there’s a twist ending, that wasn’t a match, that was -wave 1-
And I had been refunded all six of my lives.
At that point I promptly quit the game, cursed the heavens, and took solace that entropy would one day bring the end to all existence and this game.
(Here we see the final moments of Ryan Reynolds, survived by Jeff Bridges because no matter what movie choices he makes he’ll keep getting work.)
