R.I.P.D is based on the movie of the same title; a supernatural comedy in which Ryan Reynolds dies and becomes one of the Rest in Peace Department, a unit of law-enforcers who protect the living from the dead.

This apparently translates to a horde-mode shooter featuring the laziest level design and stupidest A.I seen in any game in recent years, and should be avoided at all costs. The game is almost a cheap re-skin of developer Old School Games’ own God Mode, seemingly created to cash in on the movie (which is apparently one of 2013’s great cinematic blunders in and of itself).

The basic premise behind the game is simple: you and a co-op partner – whom you’re simply not going to find – slaughter scores of the undead in wave-based shooting segments that seem to drag on forever.

The gameplay consists of spawning into a map, and shooting enemies called Deados , and yes, they’re actually called that.  You can play as either Roy or Nick, and mow down wave after wave, wondering if the afterlife could really be this tedious. There is an attempt here at some advanced game design though, as you can fill up a gauge to access new abilities such as a healing zone, a stun, and a damaging area-of-effect ability. However, these skills don’t really help much when you can just shoot them. A few different scenarios may occur in which you may have to arrest an enemy by standing near him, or hold points by standing in them, but in reality it’s not that big a change from what you were always doing, which is to simply stand and fire.

Arrests and point-capture could be interesting were it not for the way the game handles ammo. Ammo boxes are located at certain points in the stage, and arrests and point-capture can occur right next to them, so you essentially make a stand with infinite ammo, making the proximity-based gameplay redundant as you don’t have to move.

What is abundantly clear from the start is that not a lot of effort has gone into the game. After a brief motion-comic intro that sets up the premise, you are dumped into a basic menu in which you can pick a character and map, and then off you go.  The game wouldn’t be so hopelessly boring if the enemies had more variety in how they behaved, moved, or even looked, but they are all mindless husks that will just stand there and get shot at, offering next to no challenge. Technically, there are different enemy types, including a healer who sometimes runs around healing her allies, which is fine – but all it means is that you shoot the healer first, and then kill the Deado that was chasing you anyway.

Speaking of chasing, the A.I on most of the enemies that are melee based is practically non-existent, meaning they will mindlessly run at you, becoming cannon fodder.

The game doesn’t feature a traditional campaign for you to play through, instead just throwing you into completely generic and out-of-context locations. Why are you fighting in a meth lab and a public library? are these even in the film? There is no indication whatsoever of what these locations mean or what you’re doing there. The horde-mode style of gameplay, in which you must survive waves and waves of enemies, is popular in many multiplayer games, but here it is rendered boring because the length of even a single wave is just too long.

The actual process of shooting Deados in the face isn’t particularly inspired either, because it’s so hopelessly repetitive. You can just stand still and fire away, and when the screen goes black and white you can just dive out of the way, let your health regenerate and find somewhere else to stand and shoot.

The melee Deados have next to no A.I and will just run at you like idiots

Granted, the map design is up to a basic level in some ways. For example, choke-points appeared not to exist, so the enemies couldn’t be bottlenecked so easily, but that’s all that can be said. Dive-rolling is fairly useless, as it doesn’t even get you across small gaps, and in one level there are open windows you think you could jump through but you instead just collide with nothingness.

If there’s one even remotely redeeming feature about the game, it’s that you can place bets on each other’s performance in the pre-game loading screen, which introduces a competitive element to the co-operative play. But it still revolves around your performance in an unbelievably boring and shallow game; you’re likely to not care.

If you’re wanting to spend time with a friend shooting zombies, there are tons of better games out there that allow you to do that to you heart’s content. RIPD: The Game needs to rest in peace among the licensed games sent to market to die, while the industry continues to wonder why games like this keep getting made.