Follow TV Tropes

Following

YMMV / Dead to Rights

Go To

  • Alternate Character Interpretation: Courtesy of slowbeef, making Slate a mix of Memetic Badass and Memetic Psychopath who eventually solves Grant City's crime problems by killing everyone there. Meanwhile, Shadow is the Hypercompetent Sidekick who figures everything out early into the game and just does most of the brainwork while Slate just bumbles around and kills everyone.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Blanchov in 2. After taking out his Dragon (in a much more epic gun battle), a cutscene activates showing Jack casually walking up to Blanchov and shooting him in the chest just once. After that, he dies. You don't even have to touch the controller.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Fahook getting drunk and shirtless in Level 14 for absolutely no discernible reason. It also doesn't help that his running animation is glitchy as hell.
  • Breather Boss: Meeshaka and Shadraka in the first game. Coming right off the heels of Pinnacle and a storm of men trying to stop you from setting a bunch of explosives, they might seem intimidating at first blush due to the timer on your back and one of them having a grenade launcher, but the truth is that .50 Auto pistols are damned strong and it's not hard to have four full on ammo (particularly since a a few of them spawn as the shootout starts), so unloading them into one of the two, ideally Meeshaka since she's the one with the hitscan guns, during a single slow dive will take that one down, allowing you to focus on the other and, if you did get rid of Meeshaka first, avoid the grenades with minimal effort while you finish up.
  • Catharsis Factor: In the final chapter of Retribution — specifically in the penultimate assault on the GAC base — Jack discovers a free GAC Tank suit and gets to go to town with it. After spending most of the game needing to Gun Fu your way through countless mooks (and no doubt going through long cover-shooting sections to take down Tanks in specific), being able to dakka and explode through hordes of mooks at once with little regard for your safety provides one hell of a rush.
  • Camera Screw: The camera in the original game tends to point at the least useful position after a cutscene, especially bad when said cutscene is immediately followed by a shooting segment.
  • Cliché Storm: The series runs through this in entirely different ways. The original game and its immediate follow-ups are loaded with tropes of Heroic Bloodshed media and off-the-walls late 90's-early 2000's action movies. Retribution in the meanwhile rips its aesthetic and gameplay out of many Real Is Brown, Gears of War-type cover shooters and its plot from gritty neo noir clichĂ©s.
  • Complete Monster:
    • First game: Dick Hennessey is Grant City's corrupt police chief and head of the department's anti-crime unit G.A.C. Hennessey uses blackmail to hold all of Grant City under his thumb, allowing all kinds of criminal activity to happen as long as he gets to instill his own brutal brand of justice. Hoping to use Mayor Pinnacle's illegal gold smuggling ring to buy his way into power, Hennessey kills Frank Slate for coming close to uncovering the operation, having his son Jack framed for killing gangster Augie Blatz and putting him on death row. With mayoral candidate Gloria Exner hoping to dismantle G.A.C., Hennessey attempts to have a conference building blown up to kill her, later having the hotel she's staying at set aflame with hopes of killing everybody inside.
    • Retribution Continuity Reboot:
      • Julian Temple, owner of the Temple Network, is a cowardly media mogul who wants to be seen as Grant City's savior to satisfy his ego. Funding Redwater's G.A.C. troops in private, Temple hires the villainous Riggs to spread chaos across Grant City in order to justify G.A.C.'s legalization, uncaring that it'll mean turning the city into a Police State. Allowing Riggs to launch a raid on his own tower and kill plenty of hostages, as well as attempting to destroy Grant Central Station, Temple hopes to have Redwater killed when all's said and done.
      • Riggs is a childish psychopath working with Temple to spread chaos throughout Grant City. Manipulating and militarizing the Union gang into helping him raid Temple Tower, Riggs kills several hostages and cops by sadistically dropping them to their deaths, while also partnering with the Triads to organize the destruction of Grant Central Station. Riggs also signs up to be a G.A.C. troop, killing some Union members upon G.A.C.'s legalization, while hoping to kill Redwater under Temple's orders.
      • Tseng is a crazed Triad mobster who likes to snort cocaine and murder people. With a fondness for cutting out tongues, Jack instantly identifies a group of tongueless bodies as his work. Gleefully killing his own men for nothing, Tseng opts to spread chaos and excitement by sending a train packed with explosives to Grand Central Station, which is also packed with explosives, to kill countless innocent people.
  • Contested Sequel: The only two games that play closely alike are 2 and Reckoning, being directly tied to eachother. Thus, you'll find fans of the first game that dislike how the prequels were more arcade-like, or those that preferred that more streamlined setup compared to the first game's barrage of gimmicks and minigames. Many fans will generally agree that Retribution probably has the most well-rounded story, but may prefer the cheese of the first game, or not agree with its more Take Cover! gameplay style.
  • Demonic Spiders: In Retribution, any GAC Unit who's carrying around a Mark 3-A2 or M210 Double Barrel Shotgun, the latter of which is likely the strongest gun in the game, but no fun to be faced down by.
  • Designated Hero: In the original game, Jack Slate is implied to be one of the only honest cops in the Wretched Hive that is Grant City, like his father was before he was murdered. The gameplay requires him to leave a massive body count on his quest to avenge one man's death, because he cannot progress until he has killed all of the criminals attacking him, and it does not allow him to deal with his opponents non-lethally. The story, meanwhile, includes Jack's escape from prison involving the cold-blooded killing of a warden technically guilty only of being an abusive psychopath who beat Jack's dog; Jack only publicizing the conspiracy behind his father's death after he's personally killed everyone involved in it (including the mayor and the police chief); and Jack deeming Grant City beyond saving and leaving it to rot, knowing it will soon be caught in a massive and violent power struggle due to his actions.
  • Fridge Horror: Jack Slate being supposedly one of the few honest cops in Grant City while being a merciless One-Man Army during gameplay could be chalked off as Gameplay and Story Segregation at best or Informed Attribute at worst. However it also could mean that Grant City is such a cesspit of crime and it's police force is so corrupt, that a brutal Anti-Hero such as Jack is by comparison a model cop.
  • Goddamned Boss: Pinnacle in the first game. He's twice as big as Jack, can take a punch without flinching, and you don't get any guns. The intended solution is to get him to tire himself out so that you can jump on his back and strangle him, but the act of doing so is incredibly dodgy since it seems up to luck when he'll do the attack that leaves him vulnerable and sometimes you can't get on him even when you're right behind him.
  • Good Bad Bugs: In Retribution, just about any melee fight can be trivialized by quickly dodging to the side twice. The AI doesn't react to it correctly, and will usually start impotently doing a melee combo on nothing while Jack punches them in the spine.
  • Magnificent Bastard:
    • Original Game:
      • William T. Pinnacle III is the corrupt, cigar-chomping mayor of Grant City. Running for reelection against Gloria Exner, Pinnacle uses his campaign promises to hide his illegal underground gold smuggling operation, getting the Iron Point Penitentiary prisoners to mine the gold for him in secrecy. Getting Jack Slate on his side by promising to pardon him of his supposed murder should he retrieve Hennessey’s incriminating files, Pinnacle forces Gloria to kill Jack by threatening to murder her, only to have her killed by Jack's supposed friend Hildy. Killing Hildy after she hands over the files and hoping to frame her as the mastermind behind Gloria's death, Pinnacle also proves himself a powerhouse of a politician, able to shrug off Jack's attacks with ease, and dies joking how Jack will never be pardoned for his crimes.
      • Patch is a leader of Mayhem, Inc. A smartly dressed, dapper and intelligent assassin who frames Jack for the murder of mobster Auggie Blatz by luring Jack into a trap, Patch shoots him non-fatally, before using his gun to execute Blatz. Later blindsiding Jack and killing his ally Eve, Patch is almost able to successfully assassinate a mayoral candidate before engaging Jack in a final battle.
      • Prentiss "Preacherman" Jones is an inmate preacher at Iron Point Penitentiary who was framed for selling drugs. Having the utmost respect for Frank Slate, upon news of his demise, Jones does what he can to help his son Jack escape prison to avenge Frank's death. Getting Jack to acquire some battery acid and an escape map, moments before Jack's execution in the electric chair, Jones sneakily uses the acid and a hidden razor blade to break Jack free, afterwards taking advantage of a staged power outage to kill warden Sickle.
    • Retribution Continuity Reboot:
      • Shadow, Jack Slate's trusty Canine Companion, is far more clever and bloodthirsty than his original counterpart. A surprisingly tactical animal, Shadow uses stealth to carry out tasks for the Slate family, whether it be using his barks to lure goons to their demise, or sneaking up from behind and brutally murdering them. Dedicated to protecting Jack at all costs, Shadow successfully assists his master in the takedown of Redwater and G.A.C.
      • Captain Redwater is a well-respected officer who secretly created G.A.C. with hopes of turning Grant City into a Police State. Genuinely seeking to clean up crime, Redwater kills his friend Frank Slate to cover up his plans, partnering with Julian Temple to get G.A.C. legalized by allowing all kinds of criminal activity to happen under his watch in order to justify their deployment. Killing his partner Riggs after Jack reveals his plan to betray him, Redwater uses Temple's arrest by Jack to declare martial law, imprisoning his fellow officers with hopes of taking over the entire city with his army of G.A.C. troops.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • slowbeef and Diabetus turned just saying the game's name into a meme.
    • A lesser meme through said Let's Play comes from a one-liner in the first level, when Jack guns down a bunch of thugs dressed as construction workers: "You boys should take up your grievance with city hall."
    • Jack kicking a fence down on some poor Mook as he declares, "I'm Jack Slate, bitch!"
  • Narm:
    • Poor Jack never really gets his dignity back when he has Fahook dead to rights with a gun to the back of his head in the first game — only to get backhanded in the nuts and dropping him in seconds in a hilariously infamous case of Cutscene Incompetence.
    • The various one-liners Jack Slate dishes out are pretty hit-or-miss, but probably the biggest instance of it falling hilariously flat is right after his boss fight with Diggs, where after he finally collapses in defeat:
      Jack: Dumb son of a bitch. (beat... before Jack turns around and walks away)
    • The sequel's bad writing and Excuse Plot in general makes basically any cutscene an exercise in busting a gut. Jack's one-liners transform into a borderline Non Sequitur, and almost everyone either poorly acts or overacts the hell out of their lines, never mind the animation somehow getting even more awkward despite the better graphics. Of course, some of that cheese is So Bad, It's Good and lands firmly in Narm Charm territory.
  • Narm Charm: Throughout the series, Jack dishes out one-liners like nobody's business. Whether you think they're funny and for what reasons is extremely YMMV.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • For as cheesy and over-the-top as the games can be, some of the disarm kills are pretty brutal and even show your unfortunate victim spasming afterwards on the ground. And this isn't even getting into the Darker and Edgier Retribution having much more violent deaths, like when you control Shadow and proceed to maul a poor bastard's face (or groin) gratuitously. Unlike the older titles, it comes off as genuinely sadistic and overly violent.
    • Jack Slate himself. The series presents him as a quippy, quirky Anti-Hero that's trying to do the right thing, but he's a bit of a Memetic Psychopath because for a police officer he has a downright excessive body count and habit for brutality. It's to the point that entire areas get their criminal populace wiped off the face of the Earth because Slate came in looking for a fight, and in Retribution he's portrayed as a troubled yet well-meaning guy who also just so happens to vaporize criminal faces with lead and break their bodies in half with his bare fists with a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He even outright executes his human shields instead of arresting them, and can do this before his father's death in the first game.
  • Obvious Beta: The section on Fahook's plane. The inexplicable scene of the prisoners Jack just rescued trying to kill him, Fahook running around shirtless with incredibly glitchy animation, your clearly being meant to end the fight with him with some kind of special move that doesn't seem to exist (luckily, shooting him works too), and having a 50/50 chance of Jack getting stuck running into the cockpit doorframe after the cutscene there.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Longshoreman X gets no lines and only appears for one boss fight in the first game, but still manages to be popular just because of his inexplicably badass name.
  • Polished Port:
    • The Xbox version of the game is give and take. It had pixel shading for the characters in the game, 16:9 anamorphic wide screen support, and Dolby Digital sound support to make use of the Xbox's unique capabilities.
      • Averted, the PlayStation 2 version of the game, despite being released months after the Xbox version and had all content that also in the GameCube and PC versions, was actually developed first. Namco ported the game to the Xbox due to the deal with Microsoft, downgrading some of the content that appeared in the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and PC versions in order to push Xbox to its limits, and released first as timed-exclusive.
    • The GameCube version. Like the PlayStation 2 and PC versions has more to work with in the options menu (you can invert the looking camera and change to widescreen mode) and is more refined in general, with the melee combat being tweaked, three difficulty levels instead of one, and adding some item pickups along with bugfixes and other quality-of-life tweaks. Where it gets fuzzy (as in YMMV on whether or not it's a good change or not) is the fact that several things are flat-out removed, such as minibosses, gameplay challenges, and even some of Jack's quips.
    • The PC version is easily the best of the bunch, as it includes all the improvements from the PS2/GC versions without removing any of the content and has more graphics settings. It was initially a Porting Disaster, though, as a bug which prevented Jack from picking up propane canisters would pop up on certain machines. Given that part of the tutorial involved throwing propane and shooting it, it essentially made the tutorial Unwinnable until a patch was released. Not to mention that the DRM that's on legit copies of the game no longer work on modern systems.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Retribution is a third-person cover-based shooter where, like the previous games, you suffer from disposing of your guns the moment you run out of ammo. Then you have to go beat someone else up or disarm them for their gun. Except generally speaking, unless you're running headlong into gunfire like a fool, your fists generally overpower most foes, meaning guns are ineffective and borderline sluggish and awkward to use unless you can line up One-Hit Kill headshots. It's supposed to encourage you to swap your combat style up frequently, but instead comes off as Guns Are Worthless.
  • Scrappy Weapon: The first game has its share of duds. The M92 Silenced Pistol is probably the worst for having the worst damage in the game, no contest. Other bad weapons include the M11 Silenced SMG, which suffers from terrible range that hampers its usability considerably and the MP5-A5 Submachine Gun, which is just shown up by every other automatic rifle around. The M210 Double Barrel shotgun, in spite of being the strongest weapon in the game shot-for-shot, also falls behind its more common counterparts due to having worse range than the M11 and a horrendous rate of fire, enough so that anyone you fail to obliterate with it will have plenty of time to get back at you for the attempt.
  • That One Boss: Three of them in the first game: Diggs, Fahook and Hennessey.
    • You fight Diggs in a gas chamber. As the fight progresses, the gas slowly drains your health; you and Diggs take turns punching the mask off each other's faces and stealing it for air, which draws out a fight already stretched by Diggs' endurance.
    • Fahook is fought in the back of a plane with limited cover. His gun will shred you to pieces if you're not careful, and you have to use the bullet time dive and the right weapons with precise timing in order to hit him before he hits you. Occasionally, Fahook will take a swig of a magic potion and start breathing health-bar-destroying fire at you (yes, really), at which point you have a limited window in which you have to shoot the potion out of his hands. To make matters worse, towards the end of the fight the back of the plane opens up, and you can get sucked out yourself if you aren't careful.
    • Hennessey is even worse. He starts the first stage of the fight with an electrified riot shield which can kill you in a few hits, and will constantly charge at you, so you have to try and lure him into the water to short out his shield without getting hit yourself. After a few rounds of this, you have to fight off some more GAC squad mooks to reach the final melee fight with Hennessey. Hennessey has ridiculous endurance and will annihilate you in seconds if you haven't mastered your melee attacks. Fight back for a while and Hennessey opens up the door to the room's incinerator, then resumes his melee onslaught with his fists on fire. And at his last sliver of health, your melee-weary hands better be ready for a quick use of reflexes, because you'll have to knock him into the incinerator. Did we forget to mention there are no health pickups whatsoever during this fight?
  • That One Level: Amusing Let's Play memes aside, most of Level 3 in the first game is a tedious Fetch Quest with way too many repetitive fistfights.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Frank's death in Retribution. Despite the game being criticized for its Narm, the scene and voice acting is almost shockingly well done — Jack's hysterical breakdown when he realizes his dad is suddenly dead sounds completely real.
    • Also during the second game, after Ruby gets shot to death by Blanchov, her Dying Declaration of Love to Jack is genuinely heartbreaking, quite surprising considering the second game up to that point had taken itself much less seriously than the first one did.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Patch. He's a suave assassin who has a few fun character traits and a nice British accent, complete with a memorable introduction (and he's the one who sends Jack to prison, setting him up to be a major villain). He does not have a single line after that, and proceeds to die as anticlimactically as possible.
    • Heck several characters in the first game don't get utilized as much as they should due to getting killed off too early. Other potentially interesting that get killed off before we get to know very much about them are Eve, Marvin Silt, and Gopher.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring:
    • The series takes place in an all-around Wretched Hive where every single person who isn't Jack Slate is a criminal, self-serving, and/or dead, and Jack himself is definitely no saint, even in a relative sense given how violent his quest is. At the end of the game, the chief of police and both mayoral candidates are dead and Jack decides there's nothing he can do to fix Grant City and decides to just walk away and let it rot. About the only thing that keeps the games from being soul-crushingly bleak is the Narm Charm surrounding the ridiculous and over-the-top action and Jack's dorky one-liners.
    • Retribution, being a Darker and Edgier reboot, may be even worse in some respects. Jack's father gets some scenes before his death and he, much like Jack, generally opts to kill criminals instead of even attempting to arrest them, despite the game's claims that they're both good cops. Jack himself is less into the endearing one-liners and now just screams and curses at everyone. Even Jack's dog generally acts more like a bloodthirsty beast than a police dog this time around. About the only thing that prevents this game from being as bleak as the first game, despite taking itself much more seriously, is the fact that Jack's goals are more obviously heroic, and the story doesn't get far enough into the Grant City politics to show whether it's quite as corrupt as in the first game.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Jack Slate is a mass-murdering Anti-Hero throughout the series, Retribution kicks this and Frank up hard time. The two are willing to beat the everliving shit out of any thug that looks their way in a crappier part of town while hunting for information, and only consider negotiations when guns get pointed their way. For the rest of the game Jack unironically considers the GAC forces to be Judge, Jury, and Executioner as heinous officers crossing the line — when he himself has and will do the exact same thing in the entire franchise.


Top