“Rest in peace R.I.P.D.” That’s what I thought after playing the game for two nights to write this review as I deleted the game from my Xbox 360. It wasn’t that the game was without any merit at all. I was able to try out the co-op game play thanks to a fellow Married Gamer Staff member, but the fun we had was more in finding ways to deal with the game’s horrible controls, lack of story, lack of voice work, and numerous bugs than actually having fun playing the game.
The game play is reminiscent of Firefight from Halo: Reach or Horde mode from Gears of War 2 as waves of enemies come at you again and again until you wipe them all out and face a boss at the end. You may be thinking, “Hey, that could be fun,” (and it can be, in Halo: Reach and Gears of War 2) but R.I.P.D just turns into a repetitive unimaginative mess. Map layouts, bosses and creatures are the same every single wave of every single map. The features that do make this game a bit different, such as the option to choose to arrest or kill the final boss in each map, turn out to be a choice in whether you want to play five more minutes of the same thing you’ve been playing for the past fifteen minutes or you just want to play something else.
The game is the epitome of everything that is wrong with games made from movies. Some executive out in Hollywood forgot they needed a game for their wannabe summer blockbuster one day and decided to rush a game out. R.I.P.D. The Game is the result.
If you think I forgot to cover the story in the game that’s because there is no more here than what’s contained in the movie’s official trailer (which wasn’t even much as far as movie trailers go). I could write more about the controls, the individual bugs I ran into, the special powers you can use during the game or the upgradable and unlockable weapons, but much like the audience this game was hoping to get, I’m sure you got the point from the first couple of lines.
