If eye-bulging, jaw-slacking incredulity wasn’t your first reaction to seeing the smattering of riotous animated GIFs and trailers that have preceded the release of My Friend Pedro, there is a good chance you might be dead. Awaken then, in the knowledge that everything you witnessed in all of that pre-release media is the real deal and that in My Friend Pedro, one-man developer outfit Dead Toast has fashioned one of the most stylishly violent, pulse-pounding shooters of the year.
The plot, such as it is, errs towards surrealism. A meditation on gunplay violence played out at hyperspeed against the backdrop of a twisted mind, players take control of a nameless gunslinger who finds himself driven by a sentient banana to lay waste to a criminal underworld and haters on the internet, all the while taking an occasional sojourn into a fruity fantasy realm. I kid thee not.
In truth, the plot merely exists to prop up the teeth-clenchingly acrobatic, face-shooting action for which My Friend Pedro is known for, and when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it all, My Friend Pedro is simply a joy to play. Viewed from a side-on perspective, the goal is to quite simply blast your way through each bite-sized level (they’re rarely longer than five or seven minutes), before moving onto the next.
At your disposal you have a variety of firearms ranging from Detective Tequila style dual-handguns to sub-machine guns, shotguns and more. Where My Friend Pedro differs from the status quo however, is in how it encourages players to be murderous and athletic in equal measure.
Wherever John Woo is right now, his spirit is clearly a massive, animating influence on My Friend Pedro because just about everything you have ever seen someone do with guns in a movie, you can basically do here. From backward leaps with two guns blazing to front flip spins, dives, tumbles and even hanging upside down on a crane hook shooting in multiple directions, My Friend Pedro’s gunplay is arguably the most malleable I’ve seen in a good, long time – if not ever.
Though you can aim in any direction you like, My Friend Pedro also allows players to split their aim with just a click of a button, enabling you to target multiple foes at once assuming you have more than one firearm to hand. Throw in a triggerable slow-motion ability that’s stylish enough to make the Wachowski’s blush, and you have a resoundingly solid basic foundation for some hugely satisfying baddie blasting action.
It’s not just all offense either – a body-twirling balletic dodge command on the other hand, provides frames of invincibility which allow you to phase through bullets and other harmful objects unscathed, while tables can be flipped over for some temporary protection. In addition to its use as a defensive measure, the dodge command can also be chained into your attack strategies too, further amplifying the sense of cool and style that My Friend Pedro oozes from every filthy, digital pore.
Speaking of style, John Woo movies are stylish not just because he understands how to frame the bombast of man to man gun violence, but also the collateral damage to the environment too. Developer Dead Toast clearly understands this, as gunfights in My Friend Pedro are often nothing less than a spectacle of destruction, as bullets blast massive plumes of dust and sand off the walls, boxes shatter and glass smashes with all the furious spectacle one might expect.
In practice, watching our masked protagonist contort his body from a leap (failed attempts at gunplay gymnastics whereupon your character lands directly on the top of their skull doesn’t cause damage, thankfully), looks odd and a touch goofy but it all plays into the ridiculousness of the scenario. Certainly, the deliberate floatiness that has been applied to the main character to bolster the windows of opportunity for improvised gunplay adds to the notion that this is all some sort of delirious fever dream, where the laws of physics don’t really apply quite so rigidly as they do in the real world.
At first though, your movements will be ungainly, routinely clumsy and perhaps something akin to your horrendously non-athletic dad attempting to recreate scenes from The Matrix, or, well, any movie really that requires even a modicum of dexterity. As such, My Friend Pedro fashions a compelling learning curve, one whereupon you can become flashy and fleet of foot and gun relatively quickly, but also one where a gulf as wide as the Atlantic Ocean can be seen to exist between journeyman and pro players.
A constantly ticking combo meter meanwhile takes keen notice of everything you do; racking up precious combo points based on your stylish moves which are then in turn multiplied by the number of kills that you get during that same space of time. Again, there is plenty of potential for mastery here, as My Friend Pedro allows players to weaponize objects in the environment too. From using skateboards and running on barrels to kicking knives into people’s faces, booting gory chunks of enemies into their friends and using a frying pan to reflect bullets in multiple directions, this is a game which encourages you to experiment with all the tools in your arsenal and frequently rewards you with breathtaking spectacle when you do.
The potential for acrobatic gun-death is absolutely ludicrous and the game supports such ambitious with gleeful aplomb. For a moment there, as I double overhead kicked a football into someone’s face before landing split-legged in an absolute shower of slow-motion bullets, downing all those around me, I felt like a spliced hybrid of Diego Maradona and Neo. I felt powerful. I felt great. This is awesome.
Should you be detached from your mortal coil, in keeping with its relentless nature, restarts are instant, allowing you to dive straight back in with barely a second of valuable carnage time lost. Meanwhile, the relentless, ear-drum pestering thrum of My Friend Pedro’s techno soundtrack immediately brings to mind Devolver Digital’s feverish cult slaughter-fest, Hotline Miami and ably serves the violent delights being playing out on screen.
Like its gun-toting protagonist though, My Friend Pedro does lose its way occasionally, and when it elects to indulge in one level where the onus is exclusively on platforming, or spends too much time making the player worry about switch puzzles, it certainly feels like the game isn’t concentrating on doing what it does best.
Equally, while My Friend Pedro is arguably at its best when our ‘hero’ has gun in hand, laying waste to hordes of doofus goons, it’s numerous levels could certainly do with having more in the way of variety and natural environmental elements to really make the most of its balletic, devil may care approach to gunplay nihilism. As it is, there is a factory, a chop-shop, some sewers and a variety of surrealist levels, but nothing like massive halls with chandeliers, or wealthy estates with lots of expensive crap to break which would really dovetail into the My Friend Pedro’s core concept.
Though My Friend Pedro’s particular frenetic brand of hyperviolence lends itself well to speedrunning, there is precious little else to do once the game has been beaten other then to shore up your rankings for each level. The flipside of course is that, lean length aside, the game is selling at a budget price, so the expectation for mounds of content from a game of this ilk, and by a one-man team no less, is perhaps a little churlish.
A veritable playground of peerless violent ingenuity, My Friend Pedro is the Matrix, Max Payne and Tony Hawk three-way you never knew you wanted, it’s just a shame that an occasional wandering focus distracts the game from doing what it does best.
My Friend Pedro review code provided by the Publisher for PC.
My Friend Pedro is out now on PC and Nintendo Switch.