Dead To Rights: Retribution

The Short


Pros
- Lots of totally over the top kills
- Stealth sections where you play as the dog, Shadow
- Can command your dog to go all feral on dudes
- Cover based shooting is satisfying, slow-mos for headshots
- Story is so completely stupid it's hilarious

Cons
- Looks terrible
- Controls are just barely passable; Gears of War this ain't
- Voice acting and story are awful, so if you hate B-Movies you will hate this
- Single player is short but feels way too long
- Kills are awesome but there are only about six of them
- Not enough sections where you play as Shadow
- Gets boring really fast
- Gratuitous cursing isn't "edgy," it's just obnoxious
- No multiplayer (not like anybody would be on it...)

Have a nice trip! See you next...you know what? I can't do this. 

The Long

Dead to Right: Retribution feels like a game stuck in a time bubble. Way back on the PS2 games, two Dead to Rights games were released. They were pretty decent, where the biggest hook was the fact you had a big, angry dog to run around and kill people and that was pretty brutal. The series then fell off the face for a long while, and now it's back on this generation and is ready to kick butt and be all up in your face with its bad attitude in a "gritty" reboot. Too bad stuff that passed off as "decent" on the PS2 is not acceptable nowadays, because Dead To Rights: Retribution is an ok ride, it just wears out its welcome super fast.

The story is so completely horrible I really have to mention it. You know this is good stuff when the very first scene is the main character (a hard-boiled cop who plays by his own rules!) literally sticks his badge in the face of his superior officer, then slams it and his gun down on a cop car before snarling and stalking into some skyscraper where a hostage situation is going on. Jack Slate plays by his own rules, son, and he dont' take no crap from some paper-pushing wash-up! It only gets more absurd from there, with (spoiler?) Jack's father being offed by some gang leader (right before a convenient rainstorm), Jack kneeling above him as his girlfriend/paramedic tries to bring him back to life, and Jack looking up at the sky and screaming he'll get revenge. Seriously, this game's story is completely, unbelievably awful. Which is why I sort of enjoyed it. Sort of. It's so stupid I can't help but cringe and laugh at the same time, which means I actually gleaned some sort of enjoyment out of it. I guess? 

"I AM THE LAW!" Ok, no more Judge Dredd jokes this review, I promise. 

The amount of swearing, however, should be noted, because I'm fairly certain 50% of this game consists of the word "f***" (or some variation on it). I don't really care either way when it comes to swearing if it is used as an effective storytelling device, but considering the story is butt-freaking awful, the cursing got obnoxious for me really fast. It was just cursing for the sake of cursing, so any impact it might have had was quickly swept away for general annoyance.

That describes the game itself pretty good, actually: starts off impactful and with a lot of punch, quickly degenerates into something totally uninteresting and obnoxious. It's a traditional third-person, cover based shooter, with a few stealth elements mixed in (that's your dog; I'll cover that more later). Enemies start off easy and quickly get cheap, though you can basically cheat by shooting them, staggering them, and then running up for a free and easy instant kill. In fact, it was actually way easier during most of the game to just completely ignore taking cover, bum rush the nearest enemy, punch him once and get a free finisher. You can even have finishers where you steal their weapons if you really need them, so this one-two combo is essentially the easiest way through generic thugs. The fact that your character has a pretty robust melee system actually makes the game easier, since I can combo thugs into oblivion if needs be.

Which is nice, I guess, if you like doing the same thing over and over, and watching the same half-dozen kill animations over and over. They are hilariously over the top the first couple times (like the swearing. And the story. And basically this whole game), and then they - you guessed it - get repetitive and annoying. This tends to happen with just about any game that uses a "kill animation" liberally, which makes me wonder why developers just don't add more animations. It's like in JRPGs and the battle songs;  you know they are going to be playing your game for 60+ hours, why don't you have like six different battle themes? Legend of Dragoon freaking did that, and it was perhaps the only good thing about that game! Come on, SquareEnix! This isn't hard.

I really need to stop going off on tangents during my reviews

Anyway, the game also quickly goes from "too easy" to "stupidly hard" fast. Regular thugs, as mentioned, go down easy but pretty soon they send a billion dudes at you (and those freaking snipers, like in that picture above) and on hard (which is what I played on) it gets obnoxious. Checkpoints are liberal and all, but I hate dying in games in general, so frustration hit pretty hard. I almost didn't finish it I got so pissed off, but like Viking: Battle for Asgard I persevered, and was rewarded with...well, a stupid ending. What a surprise.

There honestly isn't much to say about playing as Jack. Headshots come easy, and the fact it gives you a more precise reticle when blind firing from cover (with the pistol, anyway) than when you actually aim is pretty stupid (and hilarious when I headshot people from behind some box without even looking). The fact that it slo-mos every time I headshot is rewarding, but again...gets old fast. 

Shadow, which reminds me of Shadow from Final Fantasy VI, who also had a killer dog. COINCIDENCE?!?!

My favorite parts in the game were (again, like Viking...this is sort of uncanny, actually) the tacked-on stealth sections where you played as Jack's kick-ass dog, Shadow. Shadow can only take a few hits and (obviously) can't use guns, but he can use "dog senses" to see through walls, insta-kill enemies that don't see him, drag bodies to keep from getting found out, and sneak through small areas. These sections are actually really fun to play, because Shadow's insta-killing (one of which involves biting a dude in the nuts...ouch...and it give an achievement for that) keeps things fast, though the graphics are so bad that when he's dragging and enemy nine times out of ten his mouth isn't actually on the arm, just sort of...floating near it. Oh well.

Anyway, these sections are a good break up from the monotonous shooting and executions as Jack, which is why it sucks that they are both few and far between as well as super short. I don't think the concept of playing as Shadow could support an entire game to itself, but it was certainly a good enough diversion that they should have put more of it in. 

That isn't motion blur. The game actually looks this fugly. Ok, maybe it is motion blur, but the game still looks bad. 

The graphics look...just passable. Locations are bland and uninspired, the guns all look like boring old guns, you fight the same batches of enemies over and over, and everybody looks like they are made out of plastic or something. Faces are particularly horrifying, and Shadow doesn't look like he had any hair, just one big texture. Lighting is boring, costumes are boring...has my point been made? This game looks like an up-resed PS2 game, which sort of fits the fact that it plays like...an up-resed PS2 game. Seriously, all those years you put Dead to Rights on the backburner, and you picked the laziest way to reboot it? For shame.

Not to mention it's made in the Unreal Engine (like every game this generation), so you get texture popin up the wazoo, even when the game is installed on the 360s HDD. You thought the game couldn't look worse? Oh, think again, silly consumer!

Hooray for graphics. 

This game really drags. With no multiplayer and a single player that feels too long, I see no reason for anybody to pick it up unless they are really hurting for a violent, third person shooter that isn't Gears of War. While some parts of it are decent, and the hilariously awful story makes up for a lot, there is just too much here that feels half-baked to give it a hearty recommendation. If you can find it for $10 or under, and again...are really hurting for a third-person shooter that isn't, you know, good, then I have got the game for you. 

And, continuing the similarites between this review and my Viking: Battle for Asgard review, I'm "rewarding" Dead to Rights: Retribution with two out of five stars. Why two instead of one? Because despite myself, I did have a pretty decent time the first couple of hours, and all the Shadow parts were enjoyable. It's a guilty pleasure (my brain was protesting against my having fun the entire time), but one that only lasts a short amount of time. 

And since seeing the takedowns for the first time is one of the best things about the game, I will now ruin it for you by embedding this video with all the takedowns. What? Now you don't have to play the game! You'll thank me later.