Dead to Right: Retribution was a surprising sleeper hit. The series never got the backing it deserved and is, sadly, another dead franchise lost to time that will probably never be revived again. Reckoning tried to take Retribution and squeeze it down to a handheld form factor, but it just didn't quite work out. That's not to say Dead to Rights couldn't make a good portable game, but this wasn't it. It's a quick, cheap cash grab with no thought or effort put into it.
There is zero voice acting in this game, so the "story," if you can even call it that, is narrated by a few lines of text and a cutscene. I will describe one level, and then you can copy and paste that about a dozen times, and there's the game. You run around using the lock-on feature to kill enemies in boring, drab, and cramped levels and just blast them with whatever you have. It doesn't matter what you use, as the game automatically switches weapons once you run out of ammo. Ducking behind cover is pointless, as you can't shoot out from it, so your best bet is to run around like a madman and mow down everything in your path. That could be fun, but here it's not. The camera swings around every which way, so cycling enemies is pointless as you will also cycle through explosive objects like cars and barrels, which are handy for large crowds.
This just continues forever. Some areas have fewer enemies than others, but once you shoot your way through, you kick down a door and move on to the next boring area to continue this process. Weapons range from silenced pistols, machine guns, and even a heavy.50 caliber machine gun, but who cares? Dual-wielding is always the way to go for one-handed weapons. You want to do the most destruction as quickly as possible. Enemies chew through your health with larger weapons, and life and armor pickups aren't very common. There are no throwables like grenades, which would have come in handy as well.
There's one gameplay feature in the console version, and that's bullet-time. You can dodge and slow-mo your way through enemies, but I found this pointless as the environments are too cramped for this. You can send your dog Shadow out to get a one-hit kill, but the bar needs to refill. I saved this for large groups of enemies. Every so often, a boss will be thrown at you, but they all play and act the same. Just mow them down until they die. The entire game can be finished in under two hours as well, and then there's a multiplayer mode that you can even subject your friends to.
Overall, Reckoning suffers from the same issues many PSP games did. A lack of a second analog nub means no camera control, and no one wanted to write a smart camera that could follow the player or change the controls around to work better. The game looks incredibly ugly, probably one of the worst-looking games on the system, and it's repetitive, boring, and plays nothing like the console version.