My Friend Pedro

Fun little side-scroller, love the dodging bullets mechanic, could have more going for it but I enjoyed my time with it.

I'm a believer in being willing to meet games on their own terms. I see plenty of people adopting this approach with music reviews, but it seems to be an uncommon occurrence with game reviews. This doesn't mean you've got to enjoy every game, of course, but we should at least take into account the fact that not every game is attempting to spark a philosophical conversation about the nature of power.

My Friend Pedro -- from what I can tell -- isn't attempting to reinvent the wheel in terms of storytelling.

My Friend Pedro is a shot em up, that tries to replicate the feel of games like Max Payne and Stranglehold (as well as John Woo and John Wick films), in a 2.5D camera style. It is moderately sucessful at doing that, at its best it delivers some of the finest gunplay moments this year, but its also a flawed game.

Starting with the story, its quite poor in here, with an incoherent plot, lack of emotion to care about anything that is happening, a lot of lol so random moments of humour that fall flat. It is really quite poor and shows some of the worst clichés of videogame storytelling.

Graphically and sonically it just about does its job without impressing. It looks a lot like it was made from unity store assets, because of its plastic artificial look, but once again this is serviceable and doesnt impact the gameplay in a negative way. I wish it was a bit more stylish though, and offered a synthwave soundtrack or something similar.

Gameplay revolves around shooting enemies and manipulating the environment in simple puzzles, more often involving levers, buttons and death traps.
The arsenal of guns is limited, and the satisfation of using them is average compared to other titles of the genre. Its best moments come from the use of bullet dodging mechanic, slow motion and jumps, as well as the possibility of using the environment to kill enemies (either through ricotching bullets or explosives or others).
These more explosive segments are intervaled with dull puzzle segments, with get more prevalente towards the latter half of the game, which makes the quality fall off a bit.

Finally, though it has a lot of flaws, its a game by a small company that still shows the huge amount of love that was put into it. Its a fine game for a short playthrough, with the option of chasing after high scores in each level (though the level design and mechanics really needed more polish for that to be a more welcoming invitation).