My Friend Pedro is a pulse-pounding, adrenaline fueled romp through the seedy underbelly of a world that none of us quite understand. You play as… well you play as someone. You don’t know your real identity and can only remember that you are really good at killing people. A helpful skill that should come in quite handy. Alongside you is your good friend, Pedro. Pedro is a floating, talking banana, and quite possibly the product of derangement or some really good drugs.
Your character begins on a quest to do exactly what the banana, er… Pedro says. And mostly he just says you should kill people. Although you’ll find your true meaning as the game progresses and ultimately ends, that’s pretty much your goal for the entirety of this wild experience.
Being an assassin isn’t all you are good at though. Spinning, splitting your aim, shifting into a slow motion ballet of gunfire, and busting through windows and walls are all part of your skill set. Then again, what better tools could you hope for when slaying your enemies?
In this sidescrolling adventure developed by Deadtoast and published by Devolver Digital, you’ll be treated to some of the best gunplay we’ve felt in years. You’ll of course be armed with a pistol with unlimited ammunition to start. Soon you’ll pick up another and the real fun begins. Our awesome assassin can split their aim while flying through the air and flipping upside down in order to target two enemies and bring them to their knees, with or without their heads.
For those that can’t quite master the art of murder with regular human powers, have no fear! You can also slow down time with the quick press of a button and destroy your marks in a much more cinematic fashion. Jumping through the air in slow motion while doing a flip and taking down two bad guys is a feeling that just doesn’t get old.
Players will progress through stages in which they not only gun down enemies, but also must navigate through a series of puzzles and obstacles in order to move forward. Sometimes the solutions to these puzzles will unveil new enemies to be dealt with and destroyed. The enemies are fairly similar to each other, though some are certainly more heavily armored and carry different weapons than the previous ones. One such weapon is the shotgun and WOW does shotgun feel great to shoot.
The environments are similar but vary in a few different ways. Sometimes you’ll simply progress through the level with very little deviation from the norm. Other times you may encounter an elevator or a zip line, each giving you ample opportunity to slay from a different perspective. We found the level design to be fairly simple in some areas, and insanely complex in others. These variances keep the game interesting.
Shooting a frying pan into the air and then ricocheting our bullets off of it in order to take out enemies above us and out of reach of our weaponry did more than just make us feel super cool. It also made us realize the insane sound design that My Friend Pedro contains. Everything from a different track for each stage all the way up to everything in the world making distinct sounds make the sound design a near masterpiece in our eyes.
All in all, there’s nothing wrong with My Friend Pedro. Although the levels can seem a bit repetitive after the first few worlds, there’s still a lot to love here. My Friend Pedro will take you on a journey to the most extreme depths of beautiful violence… and you’ll love every second of it.
As a sidenote, we played My Friend Pedro from start to finish on both Nintendo Switch and PC. The game performed nearly identically on both platforms. The one thing that sets the PC version ahead is that after every level, the game picks a segment from the level where you did one really cool thing and allows you to download a .gif of it or even post directly to Twitter. This is going to make for a lot of cool Twitter timelines in the near future.
We received a copy of My Friend Pedro from the game’s PR representative but this fact did not influence our opinion.
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
