R.I.P.D.: The Game

R.I.P.D.: The Game is a third-person horde shooter built around two-player online co-op. You pick either Roy Pulsipher or Nick Walker, drop into one of seven arena maps pulled from film locations like a library, a shipyard, and an apartment rooftop, and survive five escalating waves of supernatural criminals called Deados before collecting a bounty and moving on. That is the entire loop. There is no campaign in any meaningful sense, no cutscenes after the opening comic-book slideshow, and no AI teammate to fill the second slot if you cannot find a partner online. On paper the loadout structure has some shape to it. You start with a pistol, shotgun, and submachine gun, then grind bounties to unlock an assault rifle, revolver, harpoon gun, grenade launcher, hunting rifle, and a handful of absurdist movie-reference weapons like a banana and a hairdryer. There is also a five-tier special ability meter that fills on kill streaks, letting you drop healing beacons at tier one, lock enemies in place at mid-range, or spike the entire arena at a full bar. A pre-match betting system lets two players wager in-game currency on kill counts or headshot totals, which is a genuinely odd little idea. None of it saves the core feel, though. Weapon feedback is weak and imprecise, with mouse input on PC carrying an artificial smoothing layer that makes everything feel slightly off regardless of your sensitivity settings. Headshots with anything except the shotgun are inconsistent enough to be genuinely annoying, and the shotgun itself requires you to stand completely still and center your reticle to land reliable hits at close range. That is not a mechanic. That is a broken weapon. The Deado roster has a few variants, including grunts, shield carriers using car doors, snipers, and heavy brutes with miniguns, but their AI is essentially non-functional. Enemies either run in a straight line toward you or stand still and shoot. They get stuck on map geometry. Arresting a boss Deado at the end of wave five, the main scoring decision, requires you to stand next to it while the rest of the wave continues to pile on, and there is no cover system to manage that pressure with. The whole thing was critically panned across the board, landing a Metascore of 39, and most reviewers noted that it was a straight reskin of the same studio's earlier title God Mode, except with a capped two-player co-op limit instead of four, slower movement, and fewer weapon options. That comparison is damning because God Mode was already considered rough. Online co-op was the only real reason to be here, and the matchmaking was broken at or near launch, leaving players with ghost-town quick match lobbies. The game was delisted from Steam in 2018 and has peaked at 71 concurrent players in its entire lifetime. If you have a key through a bundle or a third-party store, understand that finding a live co-op partner is not a realistic expectation in 2025 and beyond. Solo play is technically possible via private match but the game was not balanced for it. The per-wave time limits add minor urgency on higher difficulties and represent basically the only mechanical tension the game generates. There are worse ways to spend an hour with a friend who also has a key and low expectations, but as a shooter, R.I.P.D.: The Game fails the fundamentals that matter most: the guns do not feel good, the movement is sluggish, and the netcode question is moot because there is nobody left to play with.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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