An A-peeling Massacre!
Title: My Friend Pedro
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Developer: DeadToast Entertainment
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release date: Out now
Tl;dr: A banana tells you to murder a bunch of bad guys and I mean you need to listen to one of your five a day.
Price:
PC: £15.50/$20
Nintendo Switch: £18/$20
Family Focus
My Friend Pedro is a game that piqued my interest way back when I saw footage of the flash game released by Adult Swim on my Twitter timeline. It looked very much as it does now and that isn’t a bad thing as the game looked just as slick and stylish back then.
It’s a 2D shoot ’em up side-scrolling platformer, you take control of a random character with a gun, who in turn is taking orders from a sentient banana who I assume is Pedro. So begins your quest to take on baddies with all sorts of flips and shit that’s straight out of The Matrix.
The aim of My Friend Pedro is to make it to the end of a level killing everyone in your way in the most stylish way possible. You can slow down time, dive through the air all guns blazing or you can spin through the enemies dodging their incoming bullets whilst pointing your guns left and right, firing a tornado of firepower through their chest and popping their heads like melons.
Along with all of that glamorous murder you’ll utilise items in the environment, learning to kick stuff in one of the early levels, you immediately get to kick a basketball into some dude’s head causing it to explode like a pinata, except there are no sweets or chocolate just a cannibal’s delight of grey matter and tissue – yummers!
You can also kick a frying pan up in the air, slow down time, and fire your guns at the pan to bring down a hellfire of ricocheted bullets on those confused thugs. In fact, it was this exact clip I saw back when it was just a flash game and I thought it was super cool, unfortunately, I can’t pull it off as amazingly as they did but I still feel like an absolute badass trying. And that’s what My Friend Pedro constantly delivers — that feeling of absolutely unwarranted badassery.
Once you reach the end of the level, you get graded on your performance from your overall score for the level, whether or not you died and continued, all enemies killed, how long the stage took you and a bonus for the difficulty you played on. These round up a score and give you grade between C to S rank, this gives the game replay factor to try and beat your scores or scores on the online leaderboards.
My Friend Pedro is beautiful in that gritty cartoon-ish kind of way. It reflects the crazy carnage that you get up to in the game perfectly with the semi-realistic textures for the backgrounds against the colourful cast of characters from the protagonist to the banana, Pedro and the brightly coloured villains and the blood that squirts out of their bullet-ridden corpses.
As for audio, the sounds of gunfire are perfect for the handguns, Semi-Automatics, Shotguns and the sound the bullets bouncing off the frying pans flipping in slo-mo in the air or the explosions of fuel cans as your bullet pierces their outer shell and ignites the highly flammable fuel inside. The music is a techno beat similar to that in the first John Wick club shootout scene which adds a certain flair to proceedings.
Overall, My Friend Pedro is an incredible 2D shoot ’em up that makes you feel like a stylish killing machine that believes a banana sent you on this pilgrimage of murder. Don’t expect to be incredible at the game from the get-go as the game takes a few tries to get used to how everything works not to say the game is hard or anything but wrapping your head around when is the best time to enter slo-mo or whether it’s best to use your handguns or uzis for this set of enemies.
The Good
- Stylish gunplay with frying pans and wall flips.
- Replayability thanks to leaderboards and end of stage ranking.
- Amazing audio and graphical design.
The Bad
- Currently limited to PC and Switch.
Family Focus
My Friend Pedro is rated PEGI 16 and ESRB T for Teen. A lot of animated violence with blood gushing everywhere, you even use someone’s head as a football to kill another dude. Little Jimmy shouldn’t play this game unless you wanna give him ideas when you ground him…
This review is based on a review copy of the game provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
