The original My Friend Pedro was a PC and console game about a man guided by a sentient banana through slow-motion gunfights. It was weird, violent, and satisfying in the way that only games about dual-wielding pistols while backflipping off a skateboard can be. My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge takes that concept and rebuilds it from the ground up for mobile, swapping the side-scrolling action for a physics-based puzzle-shooter hybrid that feels fresh even if you’ve played the original. The result is something the community largely agrees is better than it had any right to be.
Devolver Digital has a track record of supporting creative, unconventional games, and Ripe for Revenge fits that pattern. Rather than cramming the original’s control scheme onto a touchscreen, the developers rethought the entire experience around what mobile does well. The core identity, a talking banana and absurd violence, survived the transition intact.
Banana-Guided Bullet Physics That Actually Work
The control scheme is the game’s smartest design decision. Instead of virtual joysticks and buttons, Ripe for Revenge uses a slingshot mechanic. You pull back on your character, aim, and release to send them flying through levels, ricocheting off walls, crashing through enemies, and collecting weapons mid-flight. It feels like Angry Birds crossed with a John Woo film, and the physics system makes every launch feel different. Even when you’re replaying levels for better scores, the slightly chaotic trajectory system means each attempt plays out differently.
Level design complements the physics beautifully. Stages are compact, vertical arenas filled with enemies, explosive barrels, bounce pads, and environmental hazards. The best levels create chain reactions where a single well-aimed launch triggers a cascade of destruction that wipes the screen clean. These moments of perfectly orchestrated chaos are immensely satisfying and entirely in keeping with the franchise’s identity. You feel like an action hero, even if your action hero is being advised by produce.
The visual style pops on mobile screens. Character designs are simple but expressive, levels are colorful and readable at a glance, and the slow-motion effects that trigger during particularly spectacular kills add cinematic flair without slowing the pace. The game runs smoothly on a wide range of devices, and the art style scales well across screen sizes.
Boss fights provide memorable punctuation between standard levels. These encounters require you to learn patterns and exploit environmental features, adding a layer of strategic thinking that the regular levels don’t always demand. The bosses are absurd in the best way, fitting the game’s tone while offering real mechanical challenges.
The Free-to-Play Tax
The monetization is where Ripe for Revenge stumbles. The game is free to play and supports itself through ads and in-app purchases, and both systems are more intrusive than they need to be. Ads appear between levels and can be triggered for rewards like extra lives or currency. While the game is fully playable without spending money, the ad frequency disrupts the flow in a way that undercuts the arcade momentum the gameplay builds so well.
The energy system is the most frustrating element. Lives are limited, and running out means waiting for them to regenerate or watching ads. For a game built around experimentation and replaying levels for better scores, gating attempts behind timers works against the core design. Players who fall in love with the physics and want to master levels find themselves waiting to play rather than playing, which saps the enthusiasm the gameplay generates.
The difficulty curve ramps up steeply in the middle chapters. Some levels feel designed to encourage purchases, with enemy placements and timing requirements that seem calibrated to drain lives. Whether this is intentional monetization pressure or just imperfect difficulty balancing is debatable, but the result is the same: moments where the game feels like it’s fighting against you rather than with you.
Content updates slowed significantly after launch. The game received some new levels and events early on, but long-term support has been limited. Players who exhaust the available content have little reason to return, and the community has expressed disappointment at the lack of ongoing development for a game with such a strong mechanical foundation.
The Mobile Adaptation Question
Ripe for Revenge is interesting as a case study in how to adapt a beloved game for a new platform. The developers made the right call by not trying to replicate the original’s control scheme. The slingshot mechanic is native to mobile in a way that virtual buttons never could be, and it creates gameplay that feels related to but distinct from the console experience. The compromise is that the moment-to-moment feel of the original, the flow of slow-motion gunplay, is replaced by something more puzzle-like and less cinematic.
Whether that tradeoff works depends on what you valued about the original. The style and humor survived. The core satisfaction of chaotic, physics-driven violence survived. The specific feeling of controlling a character through real-time action did not, and players who wanted that experience on mobile were disappointed.
Should You Play My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge?
If you enjoy physics-based puzzle games with personality and don’t mind ads, this is a strong recommendation. The slingshot mechanic is satisfying, the level design is clever, and the tone makes everything more fun than it would be without a talking banana. Players who never played the original may actually enjoy this more, approaching it without expectations about what it should feel like.
Skip it if ad-supported games frustrate you or if you want the specific experience of the original My Friend Pedro. The free-to-play elements are the game’s biggest weakness, and players with zero tolerance for monetization pressure will bounce off quickly. The energy system in particular makes this hard to recommend for long play sessions.
The Verdict on My Friend Pedro: Ripe for Revenge
Ripe for Revenge does something admirable: it takes a franchise defined by its control feel and successfully reinvents it for a platform with completely different inputs. The slingshot physics are fun, the tone is perfect, and the best levels deliver the kind of chaotic action movie moments that made the original special. The free-to-play monetization holds it back from greatness, creating friction where the gameplay begs for flow. It’s a good game wrapped in a frustrating business model, and your enjoyment will depend largely on how much that wrapper bothers you.