There are budget-priced titles that are destined to stay in the bottom of the bargain bin, and there are a few titles in that really deserve more recognition than they ever receive. While RIP3 has an entertaining enough premise (top-down, shoot-everything-that-moves gameplay) at the same time the level of quality and player involvement is made up more of peaks and valleys than consistent gameplay experiences.

The plot of RIP3 is straightforward enough. In a nutshell the earth has been taken over by an unknown entity and a legion of cyborgs that now rule the planet with an iron fist. As one of a select few heroes capable of fighting back, it is your job to turn the tables on the invaders and reclaim the planet. The plot does admittedly serve as little more than a reason to blast your way through hundreds and thousands of foes, but in a game such as this the lack of a really meaty plot really doesn't matter. The plot unravels in between groups of levels via hand-drawn slide show cutscenes that are fairly well drawn and are a welcome break between the action.

Starting off in RIP3 you select your avatar from one of the six available heroes and then give them a name. In the first level you start off fighting fairly weak and slow-moving enemies using an Uzi-like weapon that fires bolts of energy. As you progress through the game the player gets to fill their other two weapon slots with machine guns, shotguns, and rocket launchers. Every weapon has a secondary fire that expends ammunition from the clip at a much faster rate, like the shotgun - it has a rapid fire that sprays pellets everywhere and the rocket launcher - which can also launch a cluster of mines.

The environments themselves vary from level to level, as the player starts off in a sort of industrial environment with simple computer hardware blocking their path. From there the player will fight through other areas such as war zones complete with barbed wire and tank traps, jungles with large trees and ancient ruins, and other locales. Many aspects of these environments can be used for cover, but most of them also can only take limited number of shots before they shatter into pieces.

For every enemy your character kills, you net a small amount of experience. Once enough experience is gained your character gains a level and can choose a perk. Perks are arranged in a rather simple branching tree format, with the better skills having some of the more run-of-the-mill skills as their prerequisites. For instance your character can get the ability to temporarily be immune to bullets or float through solid obstacles, but to get that far you'll have to had first sunk more than a few levels worth of points into such skills as increased damage, run speed, or rate of fire. The system as a whole works well with the gameplay, and can be used by smart players to tailor their character to their style of play and make them that much more deadly.

The biggest issue with RIP3 is that the gameplay is fundamentally flawed. Enemy path finding is often nonexististant (you'll often find enemies who are doing nothing more than running in place against a solid object in an attempt to get at your character via a straight line). More often than not this means that by moving in a certain way you can herd groups of enemies into an out-of-the-way area to deal with them at your leisure, taking away from the sort of frenzy that can mark some of the title's most enjoyable points. Other issues are problematic like not taking damage when using a rocket launcher at point blank range or being able to use its radius to decimate a third of the screen ...

RIP3 supports co-operative play with one player using the arrow keys and the mouse and the other either using a gamepad or using WSAD and a few other keys. In actual play the second player keyboard-only controls made things needlessly difficult for both players, but when using a gamepad the co-operative play worked well. The title also sports straight multiplayer deathmatch gameplay which is often more exciting than the single player game, but given that the title doesn't have a server browser most multiplayer matches will be hard to get started.