My Friend Pedro

This is what games are all about: fun. This game delivers a simple concept well and then some. If you are looking for additional challenges, you can replay the game many times. It holds its value. For me, one walk through was enough but I replayed it three times just to see how my skills have improved and still had fun. Worth your money but I'd get it on sale.

a game where you defeat some of mankind's most evil villains: The creator of Five Guys, the Creator of LinkedIn, and the CEO of YouTube

TLDR: A fun adventure that focuses on puzzles and trickshot shooting mechanics. The scoring system is a bit of a letdown, and the longevity is questionable, but fun nevertheless.
PROS:
➕Fun shooting/trick mechanics
➕Music
➕Super creative levels
CONS:
➖Scoring well can be very difficult
➖Some annoying puzzles (lasers)
Content (Game world/Narrative) –
The game world consists of a 2D environment in a 3D world, so it's similar to metroidvania-like platformers, but this isn’t a platformer game (mostly). There’s a lot of creativity as you play through the levels. Each 4 or 5 levels can be pretty similar, but then once every several stages you’ll get something super creative, like a bike chase, a falling from window level, an acid-trip level through banana land, and a train. These shake up the much needed formula that the basic levels provide.
The narrative is pretty basic. What starts off as a revenge-fueled narrative sprinkled with subtle ambiguity ends with some minor twists and turns, but it's overall nothing special. The focus here is on the gameplay.
Gameplay (Mechanics/Difficulty) –
The mechanics are done well. There are two main mechanical areas - Weapons and levels. You slowly accumulate multiple weapons, each with their own style and benefits. The pistols are great for infinite ammo and for shooting environmental stuff, the SMGs are a direct upgrade, but have ammo and still great for split shooting, shotguns are great at close range, rifles deal a ton of damage and have a grenade launcher, and snipers deal massive damage, shoot far and slow.
The levels are catered heavily to each weapon that you have - some weapons excel in clearing out certain sections better than others.
Aside from the violence end, there is an in-depth scoring system that combines the trickstyle of Tony Hawk into a nice bullets and bananas package.
The difficulty is generally very fair and forgiving. You’ll have the opportunity to avoid death multiple times through the game warning you to dodge. Towards the end the levels can get a bit harder with laser puzzles.
Graphics (Quality/Technical) –
Good, but nothing overly amazing. I will make note of the awesome animations though. Whether skateboarding (yes), diving, jumping and especially split shooting while flying or hanging from ropes:
The animations are stylistic and awesome to behold.
I experienced no bugs but it did crash 3 times. Due to no DLSS, I did play using Lossless Scaling.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD
Audio –
Great soundtrack, and the crown jewel of the audio area. Each level has a different techno/house style banging soundtrack as you slow-motion blast your way through the levels. Great feeling.
The sound effects are fine.
There is no voice acting.
Replay Factor (Longevity) –
The campaign mode has no deviation other than scoring, so the player has zero choice in campaign.
Afterwards, the only thing to do is rerun levels to either get a high score on the leaderboards, or to have fun with cheats/modifiers.
Final Verdict –
My Friend Pedro (MFP) is a side-scrolling shooter game that reminds me of Severed Steel (Review:
For my biggest negative, it would have to be the scoring mechanics. It’s a neat idea in theory, but in practice, it just doesn’t work for me. Severed Steel also has scoring mechanics, but they are integrated much more naturally, whereas in MFP, it's like you are racing against the environment and puzzles to keep your chain going. It’s a good thing that unlike similar titles like I Am Your Beast (review:
For my positives, I’d have to go with the creative levels, animations, and music.
I covered the levels above in the game world section, so I’ll just finish by saying that while there is some repetition, when the creative levels flow through, it's a blast.
The animations are absolutely superb. When you enter slo-mo and are dangling from a hook while split shooting and dodge/twirling, it's like a Michaelanglo work of art.
And the music is great and goes well with the shooting fast/slow-paced action of each level and trickshot you try to do.
Overall, yes I recommend MFP, but I wasn’t as engrossed in it as I was Severed Steel. They are similar enough to where they share similar great mechanics, but different enough to where the puzzles and narrative from MFP brought some nice changes, though I do think that Severed Steel is the better experience.
Recommend?
Yes
You can find my curator page here:

This game is great, for anyone who has not played this, wait until it has a discount, buy it and have the time of your life. 10 / 10

Man, I wish I was good at this game. I got stuck at the second boss fight, but that is mainly due to my *skill issue*. Otherwise, 10/10 game with the banana of the century.

Really satisfying to pull off large combos and using the various weapons you collect. The only thing I don't like as much is the levels that require speed as trying to s rank them is a bit of a pain, but it makes obtaining so good.

I played the web version of this game back in the day and it was awesome. This is even better