My Friend Pedro Review (Annie T. Mood)
Intense 2D bullet-time.
There's a story going on, but it's very forgettable aside from the banana thing just being a banana.
The game's about shooting your way to the end of each level with ridiculous style. You can spin to dodge bullets, wall jump, jump off enemies, ricochet bullets off specific objects, aim at two different enemies with akimbo guns, and so on. Aside from just making the game look cool, there's also a slow-motion feature to help you decide what you should be doing next during extremely intense moments. It can get pretty stressful deciding who to shoot and what bullets to dodge where, all during a single instance of slow motion, but that's part of the fun.
Another fun thing to do here is to go for high scores and big ranking grades; how scoring is determined is a little questionable though and the online leaderboards looks like it's full of cheaters as usual with PC games. Not only is going for the big scores and grades challenging, you just look and feel cool doing them, always in motion shooting enemies and dodging bullets while not breaking your kill combo multiplier.
The game also adds loads of puzzle-platforming early on, which might be a turn-off for casual-play, but adds to the challenge for those wanting to get the big scores.
The last levels of each area are always the most exciting as they either have somewhat interesting boss fights, some crazy gimmick, or a combination of the two.
Despite being a very intense game, it's actually very easy to beat due to how many checkpoints there are. Every time you die, your health always goes back to being full. If you're anal about checkpoints, you can disable them in the options menu, though that's kind of pointless if you can just manually exit out and start the level from the beginning anyway.
While the main gameplay is 2D, there are some 3D things that come in to play, and for the worse.
For normal playthroughs, it's not too big a deal, probably. When you're aiming for the big high scores and ranks, it can be an absolute nightmare to deal with. I've had hundreds of my shots go right by enemies, ragdolling corpses block my own bullets, bodies glitching through walls including my own character's. Plus, anything you do is tied to how your character is positioned, like, you have to make sure the character's gun is actually pointed to where you want instead of relying on the crosshairs so you don't fire anywhere you don't want to.
3D problems aside, it's a very fun game.