Wednesday 8 December 2010

Dead To Rights: Ridiculous

Right. Coming straight out of Nier, and going right into Dead to Rights: Retribution. Lets see if this game is better or worse than it's middle ground last tennant of my PS3. If you want the short version, go to the bottom paragraph. No seriously. Its a long and painful process.

You start up the game and have to kill several gang members while controlling a dog. I have no idea whats going on, but its awesome because its a dog. You then find yourself in a bar somewhere talking with a woman with the dog mysteriously absent, "No wait Jack! Without the dog your are powerless!". The main character is Jack Slate, but we'll get more into his character at the end. I should also mention that the dog looks like a wolf, and is named shadow. Oh no wait, it turns out the dog is here. Thank god, Jack would of been screwed without that. We then enter some flashback plot exposition to show some of Jack's backstory which boils down to the fact that Sergeant Illness is a inactive jerk, and there is a gang called Union with someone called Riggs who organised them. After saving a ground total of one woman and some security guards, I train boxing with some old guy, then start the next part of the game. Go to place, kill guys with dog, this is just a bit boring. Also it would seem that all other cops in the city are incompetent apart from Jack and a few others. One of those gets shot in the second mission as well.

After quite obviously causing a train wreck, a shootout in a train station, and a boss that I got my dog to kill for me, we get some more exposition from the present in the diner, where we learn nothing! I hate this game so much right now! Its unreal! Most of this game is shootouts, punching, and the occassional stealth parts using Shadow. As not much is happening in the game at this point, I should probably talk about the combat to pass the time. In my Nier review I mentioned how the combat felt slightly sticky and unnatural, but if we were to compare that to swimming in cream, Dead to Rights: Retribution's combat, fist fights and shooting parts anyway, feel like swimming in concrete. It not only feels so wrong because the fist fights feel so detatched from reality, but its just so boring and generic considering this is a 2009 game. The shooting sucks, as shots at point blank range miss and I was constantly getting headshots with machine guns from miles away. Also I have to mention that when you get one of the sed headshots, the game sickenly slows down for a brief couple of seconds. This only exists to give some more gore to a gorey game to begin with. The stealth sections with Shadow are good though, yet another reason to like the dog more than all of the other characters.

Now that we've wasted some time not talking about the game, lets see what happened while we were gone. Well, we found some unknown police unit, shot up most of it, and then went to a big stadium presumebly to shoot up more clueless special police unit officers. There was also a sewer level, but that isn't worth talking about. We then kill someone with the most ridiculously overarmoured suit I have ever seen, appropriately named a "Tank". After that you head through more firefights, then comes another Shadow stealth section. Yes, I wait most of the game for these. Right, disarm the two... electricity boxes? This dog is just too well trained... RIght so I try to sneak through, and theres one guard who never moves. Right, lets try killing everyone in a splinter cell fashion. Get killed all the times I try. Lets try rushing, get killed. Urrghh. Apparently blowing up three helicopters of the GOVERNMENT FUNDED ORGANISATION will completely cripple it from doing anything. Hello game, this is logic calling!

After trying to blow up a fourth helicopter and then falling out of it 4 feet so the game could shove the fact that the head of the S.W.A.T was incompetant in our face, we then come full circle and the flashbacks stop. I forgot we were in flashbacks for a mome-- *BOOM* What the hell was that?! Oh, the character that we didnt know got shot. I feel so bad right now. Not. I really do hate this game. Then after a brief escort mission where you appear to heal the women by spooning her... Weird... You get dropped off by the pilot of the medicopter at the temple tower, location of the first mission. Oh and thanks for saying "Present Day" there, I didn't think we'd entered another flashback, but fine.

After arriving, killing more men, and some suprising amount of angst from Jack Slate, and finding out that the S.W.A.T leader killed his father, I don't know I stopped paying attention a while back, we then use our bargaining chip as a human shield! You know I think you really should take better car-- Did you just use his head to push a elevator button?! So after more firefights an-- Stop using his head to open elevator doors! You have hands! Sorry, after more firefights and constant complaining from your "Portable Ammo Mule", you have to fight a helicopter of which Shadow takes out the pilot (This must have been the one helicopter that I let go since apparently the police force only has four). At this point I had high hopes of piloting a helicopter as Shadow, but then remembered that this was Dead to Rights: Retribution I was thinking about. After the helicopter and my dreams crash you go through a couple more firefights, including one with a "Tank" that came out of the crashed helicopter, we get back to the police stati-- Stop telling me its the present day! This is just ridiculous now! Oh no, we haven't got back to the police station yet, the opening shot lied to me.

I'm far too angry with this game at the moment to continue on, so lets talk a bit about something that has never really bothered me in a game before this one, the animations. The animations in a game to me are not a frontline make or break in whether a game is good. Because it is this game though, I have noticed some more glaring bad animation. It was not noticable at first, but in time the animation for climbing a ladder caught my eye. It was like it was stop animation, not really moving muscles, but climbing it as if he was just switching frames to climb. Other than that most of the animation is bad apart from the takedowns, but I try not to include them because those are there to show Jack beating people up in the most graphic and violent way possible.

Alright, there isn't much more of this game. Just power though, power through. We're on the home stretch here, I hope. After another firefight, once again using the guy as cover, we put him in a cell and run into the incompetent Sergeant Illness. Him and Jack settle their differences and join forces to.... take back the city? How are we going to do that exactly? After defending the building from the G.A.C for some reason rather than just evacuating, we decide to go to Danvers Island for possibly and hopefully the final battle.

We arrive at Danvers Island an-- I swear if it reminds me that its the present day one more time... And on arriving in a suit of G.A.C armour as a disguise the game once again shoves the fact that the leader of S.W.A.T is now the leader of G.A.C and is the villian. After blowing up a considerable chunk of the building, you go through a couple more firefights on your way to confront the leader, when you find a suit of tank armour. Now we are talking, so we go through more firefights an-- What?! Why did he take the armour off! Why would he ever take the armour off! Arghh.. So then we go through some more fights, and then a suprisingly boring Shadow stealth section, and then having Shadow beaten so that he cannot help us in the final fight, we finally confront the leader of S.W.A.T, Redwater. Its a showdown of epics, and then he pulls the most ridiculous looking knife i've ever seen. As if i didn't hate this game enough, this is by far the hardest boss fight as well. So we kill Redwater, Shadow is fine apparently now, we go through a stupid epilogue where Jack says some kind words to his fathers tombstone and then leaves the cemeter-- Wait a second? Where are all the gangs? Did Dead to Rights just decide Jack Slate killed them all? Oh I just don't care. Its over now, thats all that matters.

Lets quickly talk about the characters before I end this. I hate Jack Slate. He is completely unlikeable, with a ridiculous body structure and a personality to match. Making terrible decisions and going a completely idiotic way to make sure his father was avenged. His father we never learned that much about, so I am going to skip him.

Some of the bit characters now. Faith, I assume was supposed to be the love interest, but you never learn hardly anything about her, so she is skipped as well. Redwater was made out to be the bad guy every 20 minutes, but the game did at least make an effort to show that he really did want what was best for the city. He was just going the wrong way about it is all. Sergeant Illness was an incompetant prick, with all the sense of a cardboard box. The gangs were unbelievable, none of them given much backstory, and therefore will be forgotten just as quickly.

Shadow is by far the best character in this entire game. He is the most competant as well. The thing I didn't like was how dogs can apparently see through walls and sense enemies. That was weird. Also his takedowns were as gruesomely gorey as Jack's.

Right. Going to end this now. Dead to Rights: Retribution is the most horrible game I have ever played. It is silly, has a plot that drags itself through the dirt, and all of the characters are morons! Final word, Dead to Rights: Retribution is not worth the money that was used to pay for the paper to make the instructions. 2/10. Enough said.

This is Tyramatt, needing to get this rage out of my system.

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