At the February 2026 PlayStation State of Play, a trailer for a currently untitled John Wick video game was featured. It was all CG renders and no gameplay, but it could be promising considering the last attempts to put John Wick in a video game was a passable crossover in Payday 2, the strategy game John Wick Hex that I heard was pretty good, and likely other crossovers.
Then it was announced that Saber Interactive was making it, and among my friends the hype immediately deflated. Saber’s games vary wildly from being “perfectly fine and inoffensive” to “absolute trash.” They’re kinda like Rebellion Developments in a way, where their best games are mostly above-average schlock, but their bad games are truly terrible games.
This got me looking into one of their previous attempts at a licensed game. I opted to go for the one based on a mostly forgotten 2013 movie based on an equally obscure comic book series. Bonus: we get digital Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in this one.
Based on the 2013 movie of the same name, R.I.P.D.: The Game is a product of Old School Games, a short-lived subsidiary of Saber Interactive based out of Russia. They only released two games, both in 2013: This game, and God Mode, a medieval horror shooter hybrid. This was published by Atlus USA in the final year before Sega acquired the Atlus brand, which might seem weird to folks finding out the same company that published Persona and Catherine published this. Then again, Sega published indie games like Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (which I wrote about here), so I guess it was kinda On Brand for companies to publish offbeat games like these in the early 2010s.
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R.I.P.D.: The Game’s story is a loose adaptation of the film: Nick, played by Ryan Reynolds, dies and is assigned to the Rest In Piece Department, a supernatural police force meant to take out “Deados” – their version of zombies, basically – and either eliminate or arrest them. With the help of Roy, played by Jeff Bridges, the two must fight all kinds of Deados through various locales like a Meth Lab, a Library, a Construction Yard, and eventually gain enough to tackle the leader of the pack named Hayes, played by Kevin Bacon.
The game is a co-operative game, where you and one other person can play as Roy or Nick. Though it does not require another player to play, as I played through the entire game solo for this article. (I imagine this game’s deader than a deado.) While the game gives you the choice to play as either Nick or Roy, there’s no statistical differences between either one, they’re merely cosmetic.
Each map works like this: You’re given 5 Encounters (read: waves) of deados to fight. In each encounter, enemies will swarm in and your job is to eliminate them by any means necessary. The final encounter in every match has a fight against a more powerful version of an existing enemy with specific buffs and abilities, and upon doing enough damage, you have the option to either finish the job and kill him, or arrest him by standing near him while fending off newly spawned Deados. Killing is faster, but arresting gives a bit more rewards. In addition, there’s also challenges that are available at encounters 1 and 3 that give you bonus gold upon successfully completing.
Since this came out the same year as Old School Games’ other game, God Mode, a lot of the mechanics from that game are carried over here. Challenges that give bonus rewards, endless waves, all that. The consumables in R.I.P.D.: The Game are similar to the oaths in God Mode. Though they’re not exactly one-to-one. In a change from conventional wave-based shooters, you have a lives system that doubles as an in-game timer. The game starts counting down every second, and once a minute has passed, a life will tick down the life meter. Losing a life knocks one additional minute off the timer, while completing waves will give you more time. Failing to finish an encounter before time runs out results in mission failure, and no gold is awarded outside of any challenges successfully completed.
Gold accrued each match can be used to unlock higher-tier weapons or upgrade existing ones, which just give a buff to each weapon’s stats. Each weapon at their base level is absolutely terrible on any difficulty beyond Mild (easy), with even a base grenade launcher unable to kill a common grunt Deado without needing to fire two shots. Thus, in order to get through the levels, especially on higher difficulties, it’s essential to upgrade weapons so they’re not completely garbage. But even with that, all the Deados bounce between being absolute pushovers to shredding the player in seconds if not careful. This game was strictly made as a co-op game with no balancing for solo play, and it shows.
To make combat encounters a little more tolerable, killing Deados will fill a killstreak meter that when using the 1-5 keys will do special abilities. 1 drops down a healing beacon for both players, 2 will temporarily trap nearby enemies making them vulnerable to weapons fire, 3 drops a minigun turret down to provide suppressing fire, 4 makes the player invisible and puts down a clone of the player that acts as a decoy, and 5 is an ultimate that makes spears shoot from below and trap every enemy in place, doing massive damage to each. Using killstreaks do count towards the killstreak meter, so using the higher killstreaks can be used to pile on another killstreak immediately after.
The first two aren’t really as useful as one would think, the first killstreak did save my butt a few times, but I often waited until I had either enough to do the decoy or spear killstreaks. These are usually the way to make fighting more tolerable beyond just pumping them full of lead.
One interesting mechanic featured here is a betting system between your squadmate, which has each player vote on who will get the most kills, use the most abilities, etc. This would presumably gain or lose gold based on who won the bet, but my whole playthrough was me playing solo, and this system is inactive if there’s no teammate, so I didn’t get to experience it for this article.
The game’s arsenal bounces between modern weaponry and steampunk styled oddball guns. There’s the common shooter arsenal of sub machine guns, assault rifles, grenade launchers and sniper rifles, with a sort of steampunk aesthetic. Alongside the more standard weapons include unconventional weapons like a harpoon gun that explodes enemies after a period of time, an automatic shotgun that looks like a long-barreled pepperbox, the signature golden revolver from the film, and gimmicky weapons like a banana and hairdryer. I have no idea if the gimmick weapons are references to the film or not, but they’re locked until certain requirements are fulfilled.
I really wish there was much more to say about the main game mechanics. Fighting Deados wave after wave gets a bit boring after a while, especially when I know the tactics each enemy type is going to do. Big tanky guys that will wield a minigun or a melee weapon. Healers who will make certain enemies more annoying to fight as they constantly teleport and heal any nearby Deado. Deados that use car doors as a shield, making them harder to hit. Shotgun enemies who will always do stupid dodge rolls every time they take a lick of damage. Snipers that always run away and keep their distance from you. The snipers were the most annoying, as often times they were the last remaining deados I had left to fight, and they kept always running away, which made them more annoying to fight than anyone else.
Normally I’d say that’s about all the game has going for it, that it’s just a boring, unremarkable wave-based shooter. But there is one more thing. That gold accrued throughout matches unlocks more rewards like concept art, production stills from the film, and even pictures of the development team for some reason. Filling that bar unlocks one last level. Said last level is not a wave-based affair like the others. Instead, it’s a straightforward linear action stage where the players fight bosses named after characters from the movie, before fighting off Hayes himself, who constantly spawns more enemies, teleports around the arena, and even activates slow-motion. Unlike other Deado bosses, Hayes can only be killed, as he’s the Deado Honcho of this whole operation.
I imagine a good chunk of people who played this didn’t get far enough progress-wise to even unlock that last level. I had to go through all the base levels twice on two difficulties to unlock this. This baffles me. Why make the rest of the game a dull, unremarkable wave-based shooter and yet the final level is a straightforward linear level? Why couldn’t they make the entire game be a linear shooter with random mechanics? They did that in God Mode with a modicum of success, why not with this game too? Why they took this approach to the license is beyond me, honestly.
Sometimes when I play a game that’s bad or below average, I sometimes try to play armchair game developer and figure out what needed to be fixed, to make it go from a terrible game to at least a passable, mediocre one. Sometimes it’s simple things like how they handle mechanics, or combat, or making a story that’s engaging. In this case, R.I.P.D.: The Game can’t really be fixed that way. It’s just bad all around.
If I were to even consider making a game based on a mostly forgotten media franchise like R.I.P.D., I’d probably go for more of an Army of Two kind of vibe, a fairly standard cover shooter with straightforward objectives, complete with silly rapport between the two characters like a buddy cop movie. It wouldn’t be amazing, but it probably would be a solid 7/10 game that some folk would be willing to defend it. As for what we got with R.I.P.D.: The Game, I can’t imagine anyone going to bat for what Old School Games released. Hell, I’m willing to bet anyone who worked on this probably considers it a low point in their game development career.
R.I.P.D.: The Game doesn’t really have much going for it. It’s a blander, more boring version of God Mode. Same kind of weapon upgrade system, same kind of challenges, in much smaller, uninspired environments. The combat feels flat and unrewarding, enemies aren’t fun to fight, I could go on and on. It just feels so, so cheap. It doesn’t even have a cool announcer doing his best Frank Nelson impression like God Mode did.
It’s very much in line with Saber Interactive’s other licensed game attempts, like their video game adaptation of Battle: Los Angeles, complete with using comic book cutscenes. (Related: Check out the Bad Game Hall of Fame article on Battle: Los Angeles if you wanna know how bad that one is.) At least the comic book cutscenes fit in R.I.P.D.: The Game, considering the source material.
I’ve played countless bad video games in my life, some especially for this very blog, and R.I.P.D.: The Game is the worst kind of bad: boring bad. Bad games can at least have charm, or promise that you can kinda see. There is none of that here, it’s just an absolute slog. I felt bored and frustrated while playing this game, even after completing the requirements to fight Hayes. There’s no funny moments, no silly glitches, nothing that can redeem this piece of garbage. Nothing but tedium. It’s not worth playing even as a joke.
R.I.P.D.: The Game has since been delisted off all digital storefronts – Our Digital Future, everybody™ – but if you are morbidly curious for some reason, places like Indiegala do sell Steam keys for $2, but even at that price tag it’s not worth it. This game should be treated like the Deados in this series: Dead.
Man, before I even wrote this article, I was fairly indifferent about Saber Interactive’s games. Quake Champions was kinda busted until id Software stepped in and slowly made it better, I played a bit of TimeShift and found it rather inoffensive, but after playing this game, I don’t know if I want to touch anything Saber Interactive developed ever again. Here’s hoping Untitled John Wick Game might be a skosh better than this.
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