This review is coming out later than any before it and I apologize for that. I’ve actually had it done for a few weeks now, but I just wasn’t happy with it. This version is the third attempt I’ve made at writing about this mess and I’m still not content with it. The first version was too passionate, I made a fool of myself in it, raging against a decade old video game made by people no one knows. It was incredibly angry reviewer of me. The second version however was too bland, too surface level. It was simply empty noise being blasted into cyberspace. This version is a Frankenstein of the two with some extra meat thrown in. I still think I come across as too passionate, but it’s unfortunately honest to how I feel in this moment. I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews, some people thrive at it but it’s not a space I’m drawn too. I’d much rather spend my time considering what makes a game work, what makes it interesting and different. Maybe draw some positive attention to a game no one knows about or really remembers. It’s much cooler to love something than to hate it. Unfortunately though, I made a commitment to review a bunch of unloved PS3 games I bought off of eBay for dirt cheap, and this game was in that bunch. So here we are, let’s discuss as best we can 2010’s premier police brutality simulator Dead to Rights: Retribution.
Our “hero” for this bottom of the barrel tale is police officer Jack Slate. A man built like an industrial press and with a moral compass that always leads him towards his next victim. His one true ally is Shadow, a wolf dog that one can only presume would gladly go on a murder spree if ever given the chance. The story starts with meat machine Jack Slate crawling out of a boat when he is immediately harassed by Chinese triads that Jack Slate commands Shadow to slay. You proceed to spend 10 minutes playing as Shadow and viciously assaulting these triads until Jack Slate can get to a bar and rest. There is a feeling of madness that arrests you upon realizing that a not insignificant amount of this game will be spent slaughtering men with canine teeth and claws. However, before this darkness can take you, Jack Slate’s friend shows up and asks what happened. Jack Slate then explains how he got to this point as we fade into a flashback. Our second introduction to Jack Slate is him accosting a man, who I can only assume is his commanding officer, for not charging into an active hostage situation with the entire police force and murdering everyone involved. His CO explains that this is the work of union workers and tells Jack Slate off telling him it’s too dangerous to go into a situation like this guns blazing. Hearing this, Jack Slate takes it upon himself to burst into an active hostage situation, murder dozens of union workers and then let the apparent leader of this group leave in a military grade sci-fi VTOL. After this heroic display Jack Slate is reprimanded by another officer back at station for not playing by the rules and being a loose cannon. Thankfully Jack Slate’s daddy, the police commissioner, comes in before Jack Slate can face any consequences for his actions. You meet the leader of the GECK squad, which is as far as I can tell a type of Cyber-SWAT team. Daddy Slate mentions how he doesn’t like their methods, which seem indistinguishable from Jack Slate’s methods based on future events. After this brief interaction Daddy Slate takes you out with Shadow for a brief investigation involving a showcase of Shadow’s immense intellect, more murder of Union Workers, and finally Daddy Slate being murdered by a triad leader. Upon seeing his daddy murdered, Jack Slate abandons his theoretical duties as a police officer and goes on a murder spree across the city as a private citizen. After this point most of the game is following Jack Slate and his beast-hound as they go on a murder quest to find out why Daddy Slate was killed. The answer to that is apparently Mr. Cyber-SWAT needed him killed so he could stage a military coup to take over the city. Now objectively, Jack Slate should be in favor of this fascist regime change but, I guess since Mr. Cyber-SWAT made it personal he now believes the police shouldn’t be able to do what they want. Or maybe he wants to be the one in charge, it’s not clear because the mind of Jack Slate is as complex and foggy as the minotaur’s labyrinth.
The story as it’s presented is a nonsensical conservative wet dream whose message is difficult to parse at best and just offensive at worse. It’s a story about a private citizen murdering hundreds of union workers and Chinese people. It’s a story about a cop not playing by the rules who hates it when other cops don’t play by the rules. It’s a story about a wolf being set loose on unsuspecting victims. There are objectively no heroes, only murderers. It is nonsense and it sets my brain on fire trying to understand it. Every time a supposed character says something you lose a little bit of your will to keep going. Discussing it comprehensively is impossible because I keep tripping up on details that send me spiraling into different thoughts. It is exhausting to discuss comprehensively. It is a mental contagion that should be locked away for the good of mankind. It is bad, it is stupid, it is offensive and worst of all it’s boring. Playing this game by yourself is soul draining. Nothing is interesting about it or enjoyable enough to justify its own existence.
There were only few things in my time playing that interested me and none were enough to carry the experience. The somewhat novel melee system is a good example of this. You see while Jack Slate prefers to shoot those he deems unworthy, he will gladly beat to death an unlucky soul when no weapons are available for him. When you take this path, you might notice a strange snappiness to his movements. Jack Slate can strike 360 degrees around his person no matter where he is facing, however this isn’t done by having the character turn towards the direction you point the stick. It’s instead done by having discreet animations play depending on where the enemy you want to strike is. Basically, Jack Slate and the camera are still facing one direction but he’s striking in another. It sounds boring when explained, or even when seen, but when you control it, it just feels different from the normal way these things are usually done. Unfortunately, while this snappiness certainly is a benefit to the melee system’s feel, it still isn’t anything to write home about. It consists of light attacks, heavy attacks, blocking/dodging, and grabs that seem to work only when they want to. If you do succeed in a grab, you can take the hapless soul as a hostage that can be thrown into other enemies or simply used as a shield. I found however that even when I did succeed in grasping a man it didn’t provide much benefit and often just caused more trouble than it’s worth. The hostage struggles and if you don’t beat them regularly, they can wiggle and cause Jack Slate to stagger. So sure, you could struggle and flail around trying to grab a guy, or you could simply beat him down. We should not however forget the most common option, just shooting them.
While I’ve covered third person shooters before this is the first cover based third person shooter I’m discussing. A genre first seen in the N64 classic Winback and crystalized in the Gears of War franchise, cover based shooters are borderline poison to my system. They are a genre I find intrinsically unenjoyable and uninteresting; along with things like Modern Military Shooters, MOBA’s, and SoulsBournes. There are exceptions to all of these but as a rule, I do not care for the slow plodding sludge that makes up these games. This is all to say Dead to Rights: Retribution had the deck stacked against it to begin with. With everything discussed before there’s not a lot that could’ve been done to save this game, but the gunplay certainly could’ve been a bright spot. We are not so lucky. Gunplay can be described as functional, but not fun. It is not difficult, it is not complicated, it is not interesting, it simply is. The closest it gets to interesting is when you disarm someone the game aims up your reticle to line up with your victim’s head as they recoil back for an instant headshot if timed correctly. That’s about it. Sure, there are strange sci-fi weapons that appear but they’re often times just more annoying versions of more conventional weapons you’ve already been using. And of course, you don’t hold onto any of these weapons. There is no arsenal that you slowly build up and master. Instead, it’s standard military shooter dreck where you’re constantly picking up and discarding random firearms as you go on your journey. This is another decision that I intrinsically do not care for. I tolerate it in games like Halo where it was a novel experimental design decision but when every game is doing it, which they were, it feels like an intentional hampering of the gameplay experience. It certainly can give designers stricter control of the player experience but if you’ve read my previous reviews, I’m certain you’ve noticed I prefer the player to have as much expression as possible. When poorly constructed strict design runs counter to that philosophy and thus counter to what I like in games. And unfortunately for me Dead to Rights: Retribution is a very poorly constructed game.
Let us not forget that there is a second playable character in the mix here. You don’t play as him often, but Shadow is a playable character, and as mentioned before the first one you actually get to control. His gameplay is not much more enjoyable though. It’s basic 2010 stealth gameplay. You have what would now be called detective vision, which allows you see your victims’ heartbeats and vision cones through walls. All kills are one hit as Shadow and your movement is quite fast even when sneaking which causes his gameplay to feel much more kinetic than Jack Slate’s. This not to say it’s more enjoyable, in fact I think Shadow’s sections are some of my least favorite. Generally, Shadow is sent out by Jack Slate to recover some item or allow Jack Slate passage in an area that’s currently blocked off to him. Shadow displays an impressive level of comprehension and critical thinking skills in these moments. Multiple times he recovers keycards he’s never seen before and once he even disables generators for Jack Slate. Even with the variety of objectives, they’re all kind of the same and never last that long. One Shadow section is usually a fraction the length of Jack Slate’s levels. As I mentioned before there is something very surreal about controlling a hound that routinely rips out necks, tears up faces, and castrates men. A creature that the game treats as good would be a monster in any other tale. A beast that needs to be slayed for the good of the community, Jack Slate being its dark master of course. I think that disconnect is frankly at the soul of this game. You control a terrible man doing terrible things and the game looks you in the face expecting you to smile back.
The 7th generation of game consoles is going to be remembered for a lot of things. On the positive side of its memory, you have the solidification of online multiplayer as a staple in console gaming, the rise of indie games on consoles, and storytelling overall getting better. However, the negative side of this memory is not flattering. Every other game was about some crew cut wearing, built like a fridge, white man hiding behind cover before popping out to kill whatever group was deemed the enemy. Resident Evil 5 is infamous for many things, but it’s lasting image for plenty of people is that of a game about white people murdering villages full of African people. Bioshock Infinite was a game brave enough to ask, “Won’t somebody think of the slave owners?” Just like comic book writers who read Watchmen and thought they could do the same, many developers were encouraged to tell these stories after seeing games like the original Bioshock or the Metal Gear Solid series. Unfortunately for us though, most of these people simply weren’t ready to handle that kind of storytelling and wrote the trash we had to endure instead. Dead to Rights: Retribution is perhaps the most 7th generation game in that regard. I’ve alluded to it several times but the only enemies in this game are Union Workers, Chinese Triads, and Cyber-SWAT members. What does that mean? What is the writer trying to tell me? I’d like to read it charitably, but it just reeks of conservative propaganda. Of course, the Union Workers are violent, everyone knows unions are a communist ploy to make people work less. Of course, the Chinese Triad run the streets, everyone knows the cities are dominated by gangs of minorities. Of course, the Cyber-SWAT guys are evil, everyone knows cops are good guys except for the ones I decide are secretly evil. So many games at the time were like this. Some subtly and others less so. Hell, we’re still dealing with this with franchises like the military industrial complex’s favorite recruitment tool Call of Duty. Despite that however I’d like to think we’ve somewhat moved pass that, that the industry has matured somewhat and these sort of pseudo mature games have faded.
Hopefully when people of the future look back on this time in games they’ll both be able recognize how and why these games were so heinous, as well as recognize the good that was there. The genuine improvements and strides that were made in the industry, not just the embarrassing missteps. I don’t have to hope though that Dead to Rights: Retribution stays dead in the sands of time as it deserves to. There is nothing of value to be gained by going back to this rancid corpse and digging it up. No lessons to be learned that can’t be learned elsewhere and nothing more enjoyable here than anywhere else. I recommend you forget it exists and move onto something more worthwhile. That is certainly what I intend to do this month when I discuss 2007’s PS3 launch title, Heavenly Blade.
