Crash into another vehicle and you’ll either bounce right off it or pass through it as if it were a ghost. Retribution laughs at the very idea of gravity, allowing you to defy it by horizontally sliding down long straight roads at the push of the button. Seeing as they’re primarily a racing studio you’d think that Eutechnyx would at least get the bike riding bits right. And in a way, it is a perfect example of what the rest of the game entails – a broken and incoherent mess. Similar to an action-packed movie or TV show trailer, if you will. We think this intro is meant to deliver a taster of what’s to come. Next you’re presented with a shoddy motorbike chase, lasting for around a minute or so.

Textures often fail to load and punching enemies results in huge nonsensical spurts of blood, like something out of the early PSone era 3D Mortal Kombat games. Next comes a short beat ’em up section, displaying some of the ugliest ugly character models of recent times. It starts with a machine gun turret sequence with no explanation as to why or who you’re shooting at.

Straight from the outset bizarre designs choices have been made. Most of the open-world features have now been dropped, nay forcibly cut, leaving just a hollow husk of what was once promised. It’s not hard to get the impression Eutechnyx were instructed to carry out the bare minimum to get it through the Sony and Microsoft QA processes and nothing more. But not only does it look and feel like a relic from five years ago though, itâ€™s also blatantly unfinished. If Retribution simply felt dated in the way that Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines did upon release, then we could begrudgingly live with that. A small sum must have been laid out at some point as the cut-scenes were directed at Universal Studios while the story – which is set during the 1960s – was penned by movie maker Tom Smetham. Perhaps it was thought by somebody, somewhere, that they ought to try and scrape back the money invested in 2008. Skip forward to earlier this year and Deep Silver had seemingly regained faith in the Ride to Hell brand, announcing two new games – XBLA & PSN download Route 666 and a beat ’em up for mobiles – alongside the resurrection of Retribution. What happened in the years to follow is a bit of a mystery, but we assume that it was put on hiatus while the studio focused on creating Activisionâ€™s NASCAR games.

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