Recent reviews by Balauron

Stupid ugly guys run towards you and you shoot them. Other stupid ugly guys stand around and shoot you. Sometimes it's dark. The end.

This game has guns, terrorists, tactics, and corridors. You shoot braindead yet very accurate terrorists while moving through ugly corridors with your lobotomized teammates who can't tactics. Then you die and restart. Die, restart again, die, and do it again until you realize that your life sucks and you should probably go play a game that isn't terrible.

I would give this game a kick in the pants out of 10, but it's probably not wearing any.

Provided you can actually get the game to run for more than 5 minutes at a time, you'll soon find out that it wasn't worth the time or money required to do that. Gameplay's your standard third person cover shooter type deal minus a sprint ability that would make crossing the game's dull gray facility environments even more of a bore. Guns sound decent, nothing special but certainly not terrible, voice acting's pretty awful, you hear the same things from the enemies over and over again, with drawn out and rather hilarious death screams, and the script in general is up there with the likes of Global Ops: Commando Libya and Rogue Warrior, only with less profanity. The underwater sections are alright, giving you a third dimension to worry about, but the enemy AI is so simplistic and these areas are so few and far between that they don't change much.
Speaking of enemies, you've got your standard assault rilfe guy, shotgun guy, rocket guy, the commando that carries the gun of the same name, snipers, and all sorts of robots and turrets that are tedious as hell to kill. Tedious is pretty much the defining word of this game. When you die during one of the too-lengthy boss fights, you redo the section right before which often has you walking down a corridor or pressing a couple buttons and getting to hear the terrible dialogue again and again.
And the icing on the cake is that it crashed and deleted all my save data in the final act of the game. GG.

No jokes, no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥: this game sucks. Ride to Hell: Retribution is the story of Vietnam veteran Jake Conway, who has returned home after three tours of duty. After reuniting with his brother and uncle, his brother is slain during a showdown with a biker gang called the Devil's Hand. The death of Mikey Conway should have been something of a heart-wrenching scene, but Jake's completely monotone "Noooo!" kills any impact the scene might have had, and the rest of the game follows suit as Jake decides to slaughter the entire biker gang, which somehow contains more people than the state of Rhode Island.
Gameplay is your standard Gears of War style cover shooter with a strong focus of melee combat thrown in to mix things up. However, gunplay is flat and uninteresting, as enemies have no concept of tactics. They move in a straight line to a cover point and stay there, occasionally poking their heads up to take a potshot at you, or perhaps unload their entire magazines. Melee combat is worse; it's really just a rhythm of left click, R, left click, space, and perhaps E to perform a special finishing move. You have a number of weapons at your disposal, but the only one's you'll ever need are a handgun and a rifle. Once you get used to the absolutely horrific mouse smoothing, you'll find yourself headshotting pretty much every melee enemy before they can hit you once. It's almost comical, and perhaps it would be if it wasn't so repetitive.
Being a game about bikers, it is only natural that there would be a driving segment to Ride to Hell. Like the rest of the game, it's terrible. Driving sections are pretty much obstacle courses constructed in the worst ways possible: while driving, you'll see oil trucks swerve in front of you for no reason, construction vehicles drop their crates or pipes or what have you, and on top of that you have to contend with hostile bikers or policemen who pull up next to you and force you to perform a quick time event to succeed. That brings me to my next point: quick time events. This game is full of them. Special moves are done with E, but then you have to do a QTE to succeed. I suppose you could just not perform one, but then you'd have to A) waste time beating your foe into submission or B) waste ammo shooting them once (or twice) in the head.
Ride to Hell has three kinds of collectibles: cards, paint buckets, and women. Cards are scattered around the levels, and upon collecting them you may unlock a new decal or part of your bike. Paint buckets let you paint your bike a new color. Yippie. Women... well, this is where Ride to Hell transcends bad game design and runs headlong into offensiveness. You see, in some levels you can find a woman--always dressed in very revealing clothing--being harrassed by one or more men. Upon killing said man, the game cuts to a scene of Jake and the woman having fully-clothed sex, sometimes in the exact same area where you just killed those people. Now, I'm all for wasting rapists, but your reward for doing so being sex is completely tasteless. However, tasteless is really all it is, as nothing comes of it at all, except for an achievement if you rescue them all.
Ultimately, Ride to Hell: Retribution is a fine exampe of terrible game development. You will find exactly no entertainment value here that you couldn't get by watching a video of the game. Do not play Ride to Hell. Do not think about playing it. Never think about it again. Ever.

Chrome: Specforce manages to be more of the same and yet also sucks out the heart and soul of what made Chrome a decent game. Specforce is a prequel to Chrome; both Pointer and Logan are still with the titular Specforce, and they are called to help liberate a planet from the iron grip of a corrupt corporation. Suffice it to say that things go south and Pointer and Logan are stranded on this hostile planet with only a small uprising to help them survive.
If that sounds awfully dull to you, well, I don't blame you. It is boring, and the lack of cutscenes and characterization do poorly to improve things. Logan is voiced by a half baked Jon St. John soundalike with most likely a third of the lines that he had in the original. Pointer... no clue, but he's not an antagonist this time around, instead serving as your number two through the entire game. As a matter of fact, the developers might as well have renamed the characters and removed all references to the original, which is to say, renamed the characters. Pointer's not an utter douche this time and Logan is really just your average, generic, military (modern or otherwise) shooter character with no personality, and nobody else really has any, either.
The gameplay, at least, has been tightened up and the AI ever so slightly improved, though this still have a tendency to stand around like fools and let you slaughter them. Your combat suit let's you use slightly fewer of the powers you had in the original: zoom mode, speed mode, bullet time, heat vision, armor mode, and stealth mode, Stealth is not an item this time, instead being built into your suit. Energy does not recover on its own anymore; you need energy pickups to restore suit energy as opposed to having it regenerate as in Chrome. Specforce has somewhat smaller levels with more interior areas, but it doesn't have an infestation of snipers like Chrome, which greatly increases the flow of the game. However, it ends up feeling like you're just walking from one area to the next, slaughtering hostile after hostile for no reason other than that they're bad or something like that, which I guess is true.
Chrome: Specforce was not fun to play. It gives you little incentive to continue on its banal, trite story due to the lack of strong characters or a variety of environments. The whole game just feels soulless and dry.

Poor AI can't be masked by godlike aim, but Chrome plays similar to a cross between Deus Ex and Crysis with an emphasis on assessing the situation and tactical positioning. Facial animations almost begin to rival some current generation games despite being nearly a decade old, and the voice acting is surprisingly competent, especially Jon St. John's performace as Bolt Logan, the player character.
Sound design for the weapons is ultimately generic; the guns lack 'oomph,' there is little feedback as to whether you've hit your target or not, and your weapons seem to be much less accurate than your enemies'. Voice acting from many characters not Logan range from laughably bad to above mediocre. You'll hear many of the same lines repeated infinitely, and none of them are really all that entertaining.
Level designs change from wide open outside levels constricted only by mountains and bodies of water, with interior laboratories and bunkers that bleed together very quickly. Luckily, most of the game takes place outside. However, stealth is nearly impossible, as you cannot get within a certain distance from your enemies without them automatically acquiring you, though should you choose to snipe from a distance, enemies may not even realize that you have just slain their comrade who was standing just two feet away, yet once you are detected, every enemy in the area will pelt you with a hail of bullets.
Your character has augmentations unlocked as you progress in the game. These include super speed, which, unfortunately, does not reduce enemies' accuracy against you, strength that causes you to flinch less when hit, a shield that halves damage taken, more precise aiming, and a zoom function, as well as others.
I didn't expect much when I booted Chrome up for the first time, but what I got was much better, though still a flawed experience. With better and less unfair AI, Chrome could potentially have been one of the great games of the last generation, but this shortcoming nearly cripples the enjoyment that could have been had.