My Friend Pedro

Released on June 20, 2019 for the Nintendo Switch by Devolver Digital after development by DeadToast Entertainment, My Friend Pedro features violent, 2D, gun-toting action, and the ability to slow-down time.

Keanu stands at the top of a skyscraper, threatened by enemy fire. The situation is dire. How's he going to get out of this one? Suddenly, as he instinctually bends backward, time slows down, and Neo dodges bullets. Since that incredible moment graced the spring of 1999's cineplex's, video games have attempted to emulate the Matrix's bullet-time coolness. Remember Max Payne? Why do I keep dragging Max Payne? That is a solid game. It won a bunch of awards. However, there is one thing Max Payne is most definitely lacking, and that is a talking banana who tells you to kill everybody. My Friend Pedro lets you slow down time and dodge bullets and has a talking banana who tells you to kill everybody.

...What else did Mama say?

The plot for My Friend Pedro is simple, and I already said what it is. You play an amnesiac masked dude who wakes up on the floor with a gun in his hand, next to a friendly banana named Pedro, who urges you to kill everyone you see. Thankfully, everyone you see has a gun and is trying to kill you, so My Friend Pedro isn't some lazy, narrative-seeking Senator's dream.

"Guns don't kill people, games with talking bananas do!"

My Friend Pedro plays from a 2D perspective, as your acrobatic character blasts his way through stage after stage with an arsenal of diverse weapons. He's got his trusty, unlimited-ammo pistol, but can pick up the limited-ammo shotgun and various sub-machine-guns, among others. Killing bad guys yields more ammo for those weapons, but thankfully the pistols are strong enough to get the job done if you're out of bullets with your big guns.

"It's my constitutional right to buy...whatever this gun is from the J.C. Penney!" 

Your character can jump, wall-jump, and roll. He can hold two of the same weapon at a time, and even split-directions of fire. He can also spin to dodge bullets, as well as, if you didn't catch it in that first paragraph, slow down time.
You can't just go throw this entire game in slow motion, though. You've got a meter at the bottom left of the screen that drains, the longer you use your time-slowing abilities. Thankfully, when not in use, the meter refills itself. Your health meter, composed of three bars, also refills itself, though only to the top of whatever bar you're down to. Did that make sense? I feel like I botched it. If you've taken damage to the point that you've lost a bar, and taken additional damage into your second bar, your second bar will start to fill back up on its own...but your third bar will remain empty, unless you kill a bad guy who gives you a health pickup. There. Nailed it.

Forget the Trench-coat Mafia, which was definitely a real thing, and the actual cause of Columbine, along with heavy metal and video games, not Eric Harris' overlooked sociopathy and easy access to firearms. I can't wait to join the Banana Mafia! You're too late, Senator J Fill in the Blank Republican! The filthy talking Banana videogames have already warped my too-easily malleable mind! Thanks to this banana game, I can no longer tell fantasy from reality, and am now a threat to society. An actual human is that manipulable! How else could you have gotten elected?

Actually, after about an hour, I was feeling like My Friend Pedro was very basic. The graphics are nothing special, just simple 3D work without much detail, and the environments are repetitive and bland. The soundtrack is reminiscent of the gritty EDM music you'd hear in a John Wick shootout, meaning it gets the job done, but isn't memorable after the fact. The gameplay just didn't feel very deep to me, and the button combinations for changing weapons while slowing down time, or splitting two weapons' direction of fire just didn't seem to work,while all of the things the game was asking me to do seemed very rote.
Then suddenly, everything just clicked into place.

Just like my sudden violent urges after talking to that banana.

Maybe it's just that I finally got used to the controls. Maybe it was the way the game starts working in new elements, like booby traps, shielded enemies, and zip-lines. Maybe it was the game's bizarre sense of humor, compounding weirdness upon charming weirdness. Whatever the case, I started having fun, and enjoyed myself for the next five or so hours, until I finished the game. My Friend Pedro isn't long, and there aren't any extras once you complete it, but once you get used to it, it's a good time while it lasts, and every new dynamic introduced is well-implemented and thrilling.
You can't ask too much more from a game featuring a sociopathic talking banana, which allows you to slow down time and do somersaults off the walls, while shooting folks with a submachine gun like Carrie-Anne Moss.
Well, you could, but...

SCORE: 7.8/10