there are always sewer levels in violent games, and… they wanted to move someplace familiar.įortunately, the story doesn’t get in the way of the action.
#MY FRIEND PEDRO GAME SERIES#
The few jokes that attempt to bring life to an otherwise-dead script fall completely flat, like one about a place called The Internet literally being a series of tubes, or how hardcore gamers all moved to the sewers because. You play as a nameless and voiceless protagonist who wakes up in the basement of a butcher shop where you’re greeted by your friend, Pedro: a talking banana who tells you to do bad things. Story is obviously not a focus of My Friend Pedro, which is great because it’s pretty awful at telling one. Shotguns, for example, are obviously great up close and can blow enemies to pieces (and you can use those pieces as weapons to kick at other enemies), but they lack the range and flexibility of the dual uzis and pistols which can split their aim to attack multiple targets at once. While the arsenal of weapons is fairly limited and conventional, there’s a great balance between each gun that helps ensure that no weapon ever becomes obsolete. But it’s a small price to pay for how dynamically your character flips through the air, seamlessly moving from a dive to a rope swing and back to a dive, all while conveying a real sense of weight and momentum. The animations do sometimes look a little wonky, especially during wall jumps, melee attacks, and when your character has to unexpectedly land on an object. Graceful Destructionīeyond the bullet time and the stunts, My Friend Pedro simply feels great to play.
But the most creative and exciting levels are definitely frontloaded.
One such highlight is a train level that has you jumping from car to car, leaving a trail of blood and body parts in your wake. That’s not to say that the back half is bad, and there are certainly high points. The later sewer and internet levels just don’t come close to matching that degree of flow from one area to the next. My favorite level in the whole campaign is an early one with a section that has you shooting your way through a kitchen, with knives flying everywhere that can be kicked into enemies, a frying pan hanging from the wall that can be used to ricochet bullets – and then, in the room right after that, there’s another area where you can throw a frying pan into the air to take out all the enemies above then kick the pan through a window in the next area and take out the baddies without even stepping through the door. The stunts flow together much more cleanly with very little downtime between enemy encounters enemies are less bullet spongey, allowing you to focus more on the spectacle of the action as opposed to just surviving it and overall, the levels are just structured in a way that allows you to have more fun with the environment. That being said, the first half is certainly the stronger of the two. My Friend Pedro has some sort of new idea for just about every level. Whether it be the aforementioned skateboard, a weapon that opens up excitingly deadly possibilities, new stage hazards, enemies, or its own twist on a motorcycle stage. My Friend Pedro is made up of a ton of awesome moments like these, and throughout its short but sweet four or five-hour run time developer DeadToast does a great job of introducing new mechanics that prevent the action from ever becoming stale. The few things that do come close are probably also things that you can do in this game. Few things in video games can come close to matching how cool it feels when you swing from a rope, crash through a window in slow motion, blast two enemies to smithereens with a shotgun while in mid-air, and then stick the landing on a skateboard. It serves not only as a vital means of slowing down the action, but also as a way to enhance the absolutely wild stunts that your character can perform. It’s an age-old concept (especially not getting shot), but where My Friend Pedro sets itself apart is in its sheer commitment to making you feel badass as hell while doing it.īullet time is the core that My Friend Pedro is built on, and while the mechanic itself is obviously nothing new, its implementation here is one of the best it’s ever been. My Friend Pedro is an arcadey score-attack game that’s all about maintaining a multiplier by killing enemies quickly, avoiding getting shot, and finding creative ways to take down each bad guy to maximize your score.