YMMV / Ride to Hell: Retribution

• Alternative Character Interpretation: While Jake stealing a tanker and blowing up a power station just to disable a fence is still massive overkill, his rampage can be seen as (very slightly) Less Disturbing in Context depending on how you view the truckers and plant workers that serve as enemies in this section. The truckers attack Jake on sight even before he displays any intent to steal the tanker, and there's another trucker inside Colt's farmhouse threatening a hooker, which raises the possibility that they're connected with Colt's drug operation and not just innocent civilians caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: The "Find and enter cover with LB/L2" prompt. Instead of simply showing up once so the player can memorize it, it pops up at random throughout the game, even when there are no enemies present.
• Awesome Art: The game’s cover art looks incredibly epic and badass. The rest of the 2D art used on the loading screens and such also looks great.
• Awesome Music: Despite most of the soundtrack consisting of faux-1960s guitar riffs, the opening song, "Pressure and Time" by Rival Sons is pretty damn good. "Two Faced Snarl", Speed Crunch and "Around the Ring" are standout examples as well.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The game’s fully clothed sex scenes quickly became the most infamous part about the game.
  Scott The Woz: See, with speedruns of Ride to Hell: Retribution, even though skipping the sex cutscenes is 100% beneficial, nobody does it.
• Bile Fascination: Given how poorly this was reviewed, it was inevitable. Yahtzee advises people play it for just that reason, as he found tearing into it immensely fun because nothing brings people together faster than bashing on something that they hate.
• Camera Screw: The camera controls are not very reliable, to say the least, which can make combat very difficult.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Pretty Boy dramatically reveals that Jake's dad is dead, which might have had weight if the player was ever given a reason to think he was alive in the first place.
• Complete Monster: While the game is full of outlaw bikers and other nasty customers, these two manage to stand out from the pack in a big way:
  • Caesar is the founder of the Devil's Hand, a powerful biker gang responsible for drug dealing and illegal arms trading on an international scale. Originally a close friend of Toledo Conway, the power-hungry Caesar grew to enjoy the thrill of hurting others and desired to be something far greater than a humble biker. Betraying Toledo, Caesar steadily amassed support to transform his hometown into a criminal empire and deposed his former friend by drowning him in debt, taking everything away from him but his wife, whom Caesar lusted after. After Toledo fled with his wife following a lost "all or nothing" race, Caesar, feeling his ego was wounded, brutally murdered both of them and passed an order to hunt down every remaining Conway and their friends to the last child. Expanding his gang to a paramilitary force that threatens the region, Caesar will stop at nothing to achieve more power.
  • Cook's Mad Recipe DLC: Cook is an influential Devil's Hand lieutenant. A Vietnam veteran who went mad during his tour of duty, Cook was discharged for instability and subsequently blamed America for all his suffering. Joining the Devil's Hand for his own ends, Cook exploits the gang to procure a means to exact revenge on all of America. Executing his plans at the height of Caesar's conflict with Jake Conway, Cook secures a miniature atomic warhead and ultimately plans to launch it in the hopes of completely destroying his own country, proclaiming Americans must suffer as he did in Vietnam.
• Designated Hero: Jake always solves his problems in the most convoluted and violent manner possible, even when saner options exist. Case in point, his solution for bypassing an electric fence consists of stealing a tanker and using it to destroy a power plant to cut the electricity, murdering a whole bunch of truckers, cops, and plant workers along the way, instead of simply finding the off switch, using the trees to jump over the fence, or simply destroying the fence. On top of that he kills people wantonly, frequently uses torture to extract information, and is quite sexist.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Jake always displays a flat affect even when he's obviously trying to express intense rage or anguish, and he always goes for ridiculously convoluted solutions to his problems even when they result in collateral damage. It gives the feeling that he either suffers from some kind of personality disorder or is simply suffering from PTSD caused by both his experiences in Vietnam and the death of his brother.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Brandy, due to being the only woman who actually does something, as well as actually having a fairly good voice actor as well as a sexy English accent.
  • Meathook and Colt, for their over-the-top accents that help them stand out from the rest of the Devil's Hand and give them at least somewhat of a personality.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • The sex scenes, where Jake and his sex partner have completely deadpan facial expressions. And both remain fully clothed.
  • Also the fact the Rescue Sex is always preceded by Jake killing the man harassing the woman, and you get it on right in the same room as their bloody corpse!
  • It's not clear if this was a stylistic choice or not - the scenes would show too much nudity if the characters were actually naked, but the developers still added these scenes into the game. A simple Fade to Black would've sufficed.
• Fridge Horror: Why is Jake so seemingly Ax-Crazy straight to the point of the numerous tropes listing how much of an asshole he is? He just got back home from a tour in Vietnam, and is blatantly edgy and twitchy, almost ready for violence with what seems like PTSD. With his brother Mikey dying so shortly after coming back home, he's effectively pulling a John Rambo as a traumatized vet with nothing holding him back from considering every biker gang member in the county someone to shoot.
• Game-Breaker:
  • As Rerez, Scott The Woz, ProJared, and Dark Lord Jadow 1 all mention in their reviews, spamming the Heavy Attack makes melee combat a complete joke.
  • You can even disregard melee combat altogether and headshot enemies with your pistol before they get into fighting range. This may be why the Elite Mooks have bulletproof masks to go along with their insane health capacity, as otherwise the player could go through the entire game without ever having to fight an enemy hand-to-hand.
  • A rare meta example: shortly after its release, the Steam version went on sale for a whopping 160% off, making it impossible to purchase due to breaking the pricing system. Due to this anomaly, it was pulled from the store entirely, thus this version has lead many to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Eutechnyx, the developers of Ride to Hell: Retribution, once made a game based on The Fast and the Furious which generally considered above-average though thematically it resembles Tokyo Xtreme Racer more than The Fast and the Furious. Fast & Furious Crossroads would somewhat unintentionally become the second time a well respected racing game developer's reputation (Slightly Mad Studios of Need for Speed: Shift and Project Cars fame, the former responsible for helping a franchise trying to get away from being The Fast and the Furious Rice Burner copycat of their Underground days) ruined by making a terrible action-oriented vehicle game.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The real name of Jake and Mikey's father is William Conway.
  • Pretty Boy, fed up with his men's incompetence in dealing with Jake, proclaims "Fine, I'll do it myself!".
• Inferred Holocaust: Destroying a power plant dam could do even more damage than just shutting down an electric fence. For example, Jake could've caused a massive power outage of at least four different states including his own, which would likely result in dozens if not hundreds of deaths by heat stroke in the area's arid climate due to air conditioning being lost, not to mention deaths from the breakdown of law and order that would result from such a large blackout. Even worse, if the explosion somehow broke through the wall of the dam, there could've been a massive flash flood that could cause the deaths of millions including Jake himself. Jake is very lucky that the story simply ignores this, otherwise he'd have an untold amount of blood on his hands just from trying to get past an electric fence.
• Lost in Medias Res: The game starts with Jake driving his bike, interspersed with scenes of him engaging in a turret sequence in the woods, having a fistfight in front of a waterfall, and jumping over a helicopter on said bike. The first two scenes are never explained or reappear again, and the third has little relevance in the storyline.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Given the game’s reputation, people have taken to using the 1% in the game’s title (which is meant to refer to biker culture) to refer to the game’s only redeeming factor (honest rating in cover), average score from critics, or the amount of the game that was completed at release.
  • The -160% off sale (which so far only happens to this game and in reality, it causes an error that made Steam users unable to purchase it because pricing cannot be negative) is jokingly referred to by gamers as either Steam or Eutechnyx knew that the game is so bad that they'll pay those who will play it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Caesar tortures Mack to death and leaves his body for Jake to find with a challenge on it.
• Narm:
  • The sex scenes and the events that lead up to it are meant to be serious, but end up laughable for a number of reasons.
  • Jake's incredibly wimpy "angry scream". See it for yourself in this video.
  • Every scene in the game where "acting" is attempted. This one stands out the most.
  • The animation for the contextual kill where Jake smashes a guy's head against an object is rather "poofy".
  • Anytime when the camera zooms up on Jake's face because of his goofy-looking facial expressions.
  • It's possible to enter a quick time event called "rage mode" to dispatch a baddie, which always starts with Jake grunting angrily into the camera; especially narmful if accompanied with total silence, as for large sections of the game there's no music playing.
  • There's a contextual kill which has Jake throw an innocent security guard off a bridge; however, most of the time the body won't fall off and will just limply hang by its legs over the water.
  • Pretty much all of the cutscenes are ruined by the bizarre, almost unsettling lack of any music or sound effects whatsoever. Mikey's death is especially bad about this, literally the only sounds are dialogue and the gunshots, which turns an already overwrought scene into a weird pseudo-comedic masterpiece.
• Never Live It Down: Jake destroying a power plant so he can deactivate an electric fence is brought up by so many reviewers (and mentioned so many times on this very page) that you'd think it was the only thing he ever did in his lengthy revenge quest.
• Obvious Beta: The game’s enormous amount of bugs, hilariously poor AI, massive amounts of obvious Padding, and issues such as the Jake’s hair on his model being unfinished and textures loading during cutscenes make it very obvious that the game was a rush job from an inexperienced dev team that was originally a Wide-Open Sandbox that was hastily cut down.
• Padding: Much of the game could've been shorter if Jake went for simpler schemes. One gets the feeling that his Complexity Addiction is just so the game can have enough content. Of special note is the section where Jake deals with an electric fence in the most convoluted way possible.
• Porting Disaster: The PC port is essentially a straight console emulation, with no effort put into adapting it to the PC. There are no graphics options (you can't even change the resolution!), you can't rebind the keys, and even the mouse controls are sluggish and unresponsive due to being some kind of gamepad emulation rather than a true mouse solution. And as previously mentioned, shortly after its release the Steam version broke to the improbable discount, leading to its removal.
• Retroactive Recognition: David Howard Thornton, AKA Art the Clown, voices Anvil.
• Review Ironic Echo: A lot of outlets got a lot of mileage out of saying that the "1%" on the title logo was the game's approval rating (or the amount of the game finished during development).
• Scrappy Mechanic: Saving a woman from her attacker automatically leads to the aforementioned sex scenes. Meaning if you're pressed for time, or if you're not interested, you have to go out of your way to avoid saving them in the first place. The reason they even exist is that after you finish with the woman, your health and ammo are fully refilled... except Jake has Regenerating Health and ammo drops are all over the damn place, so there isn't even a good gameplay reason to do this.
• Signature Scene:
  • The part where Jake murders a bunch of civilians and police to steal a truck and drive it into a power plant to turn off an electric fence has become this, for all the wrong reasons. Nine times out of ten in a review, the reviewer will single out this particular section for mockery or to point out the countless much more sensible ways he could’ve dealt with the fence.
  • The game’s infamous sex scenes also qualify. The characters all look emotionless, and bang with their clothes on to cheesy vintage porno music. And the "sex" scenes take place immediately after saving the women from assault.
  • There's also the scene right after Jake kills Anvil:
  Mack: Jake? What the hell happened?
  Jake: Ahhrrrhh.
• So Bad, It's Good: The sheer number of flaws in the game's story, gameplay, and overall design makes it rather entertaining in a twisted way. It's why Yahtzee considered it the game industry's answer to Plan 9 from Outer Space.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Jake’s model has an obvious bald spot in his hair where they didn’t finish the model that's visible when you zoom in to aim.
  • Half of the time textures don’t load in for several seconds in cutscenes.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While the Devil's Hand is undoubtedly evil, Jake himself doesn't seem much better thanks to his reckless disregard for collateral damage. And then you find out that the entire feud was started by a bet between the Devil's Hand leader and Jake's father, wherein if he lost he would effectively sell his girlfriend into slavery.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Jake's revenge quest for his brother becomes less sympathetic over time as he starts murdering innocent people who had nothing to do with the Devil's Hand just to accomplish his revenge quest. He also enables a woman to drink so much that she passes out and he doesn't hesitate to fuck every single woman he rescues, even those he just rescued from being sexually assaulted.
  • Jake's dad. All we know of him is that he is a former biker who had to abandon his kids because he gambled his wife on a race he lost, so he scarred his opponent and ran for it, killing a bunch of other bikers. Somehow Jake still cares about him despite the reveal, and no one brings up how fucked up betting the woman you love on a race is.

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