🍌 My Friend Pedro "REVIEW" - "pass me those guns and gimp mask" 🍌 #GameDev #IndieGame

A 2D shooter with some very cool ideas and tricks up its sleeve, throughout the fun, I had with the four-hour running time, I couldn’t help but think that this is as close to a John Wick game as we’ll get, which is absolutely fine because it really is great fun.

When I watched the trailer for My Friend Pedro and thought, ‘that looks cool’, I had no idea that, upon playing it, it would be the kind of game that kept me up well into the night as I blasted my way through the snappy levels in acrobatic fashion, eyes burning with tiredness, the moreishness of the game kept winning as I ploughed through to the end in a single sitting.

The game begins with the player character donning a mask and being guided on his path by a floating and quite pleasant, if surreal, banana, beckoning him to take down various unsavoury characters seemingly tied to our protagonist’s forgotten (and largely unexplored) past.

The core gameplay sticks with the formula throughout with a few bells and whistles added, but never deviating from the basics we are taught by our banana-teacher in the first few levels…this is fine because they never failed to be satisfying to me. The game is a quite balletic shooter, your character can flip, leap and wall-jump as he wields multiple weaponry including shotguns, machine guns and even sniper rifles. The game has a very neat mechanic in which you can lock a gun in one direction whilst freely firing the other, combine this with dangling from chains, travelling down zip-lines and making death-defying leaps with shots bouncing off airborne frying pans, killing enemies in every direction in slow-motion and its easy to see how I got lost in the bullet-ey-ness of it all.

The slow motion in the game works from a meter which is always re-charging and can be sped up by killing enemies, smashing through a window and taking out a room full of turrets, hired thugs and hardcore gamers (natch) is always nothing but a pure blast.

The viewpoint of the game reminded me of Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate (although the similarity ends there), a 2.5D linear world which you make your way through at a solid pace. There are some technical issues such as slowdown when the on-screen action gets quite frenetic but this is oddly not too problematic as the sluggishness that ensues is not dissimilar to the heavily-used slow-motion in the game anyway and so its covered up relatively well (wall-jumps in slow-motion are always irritating though, due to the timing required). The game also spends far too long in the sewer section but the gentle variety in boss levels and the latter dream-like moments and puzzle-platforming sections make up for it.

Summary

With a tongue firmly in cheek, the approach and inherent fun in simply traversing the levels, My Friend Pedro was a real surprise, if you don’t click with the game in the first few minutes, you probably won’t enjoy the rest but if you want some frantic double-pistol wielding action, this is the place to be, just don’t expect the story to make any sense.

Or the ending.

Or the level design.

Basically the unimportant stuff here…now pass me those guns and gimp mask.

❄️ RATING: ICE COOL ❄️

Ratings Explained

ICE COOL (Great Game Recommended)

MELTING (Recommended with reservations, one to consider if you are a fan of the genre)

MELTED (Not A Recommended Purchase)