My Friend Pedro (Xbox One)
Since at least 2001’s Max Payne, it’s been pretty clear that slow motion and gunplay are a great combination in a video game. If you want your shooting to look as flashy as the well-choreographed, special effects laden stunts of a feature film, all you need to do is turn down the speed in a game for a bit and now the player actually has the chance to set things up and aim their shots like an action hero.
My Friend Pedro’s sidescrolling levels are almost all about setting up situations where the player can activate slow motion to handle the overwhelming number of gunman that get in the masked protagonist’s way. Waking up in the back of a butcher shop where the owner happily carves up human meat for sale, this unnamed character gets up when he hears the voice of his floating banana friend Pedro speaking to him. Even though My Friend Pedro mostly takes place in a grimy vision of the future were large swathes of major cities have been left to rot and the inhabitants of them openly engage in criminal activities, My Friend Pedro is also a comedy, with things such as the sewers being inhabited by nerds who now try to live out the actions seen in their video games and role-playing sessions and an entire world of the game taking place in Pedro’s domain where everything is as off the wall as the floating banana.
No matter where you find yourself, your goal, as Pedro tells it, is to fight your way through the awful people in charge of this destitute city, taking out any bounty hunters, haters, or sewer-dwelling roleplayers as is necessary to get to the heads of the organizations. Platforming ends up playing a big part in My Friend Pedro as not only can you wall jump with ease, but performing aerial acrobatics also plays into the game’s scoring system, each level ending with a rating of how flashy you were as you progressed through the stage. The masked protagonist needs to vary up how he kills the henchmen in his way, but the opposition is surprisingly good with their weapons, meaning slowing time down is not only good for setting up stunts, but it also helps with avoiding taking unnecessary damage. Doing a twirl will let you dodge some shots as well, but keeping slo-mo going quite often is the better option, and while health needs to be replenished with pick-ups, slow motion is a meter that drains as it is used but is refilled by killing baddies and performing over the top tricks.
The flashy action is My Friend Pedro’s bread and butter, with the game concocting many different ways you can perform impressive feats. Not only can you dual wield weapons and aim both freely in different directions, but you can accurately do so while flipping around in the air, riding a skateboard, bursting through a window, or many other visually impressive tricks that are rewarded with the proper amount of points for such spectacle. Levels will contain objects like frying pans you can kick up in the air to ricochet bullets off of, gasoline canisters you can toss in the air and shoot at the perfect time to obliterate a group of enemies, and even if the enemy is crowding you, you can get physical for a bit to force them back and then continue to mow down the opposition in spectacular fashion. Some levels will even completely shift how things are played, having the player fight on the back of a motorcycle or while experiencing an impossibly long fall off the side of a building where everyone else is falling with you. While the world’s appearance may often be dark and dreary save for the deliberately stark contrast of the portion set in Pedro’s goofy and colorful abstract world, the actions you engage with are anything but as they all embrace the fantasy of being some superhuman gunman who can hit every target he aims for.
My Friend Pedro throws in a few different weapons over the course of the adventure, pistols kicking things off but soon new guns like automatics and semiautomatics giving you greater bullet output. Thanks to slow motion, something like a shotgun spray can actually be planned to hit multiple targets with a bit more precision than the weapon’s known for, but a sniper rifle still has its place as the long shot can accurately hit foes from far away with a lethal blast. Most enemies actually ask for a few bullets to put down, and when automatic turrets and other machines are added to the enemy forces, you need to not only put out a lot more damage, but often find a weak spot to even make your mark. My Friend Pedro also includes plenty of puzzle interludes where you might need to do something like move between electrical barriers as they turn on and off or manipulate a lever with your bullets to navigate a small maze like area. The puzzle interludes are a decent way of cooling things down to prevent the game from being overwhelming with its constant stylish stunts. However, the linearity of the puzzle solutions soon reveal something about the action as well thanks to the frequent juxtaposition.
While My Friend Pedro is all about giving the player the sensation of pulling off amazing tricks and cool yet impossible feats, all of these are rather rigidly defined. You may be in control of if you’re back-flipping or wall-jumping when you open fire, and making something like the awkward skateboard actually play into your kills is often more trouble than its worth, but these confrontations with enemies are always set up to essentially be completed in the outlined way. Kicking a frying pan into the air to ricochet bullets off of it is definitely appealing and fun to execute, but the enemies are all standing in the perfect spot for the frying pan trick to be pulled off, and the only other option for killing those guys is to just leap in and start firing. The ricochet becomes a constantly telegraphed action as the game makes segments where some foes can only be hit if you bounce a bullet off the indicated metal signs. It is still enjoyable to pull off these clearly outlined actions and even if you do mess up the more difficult set-ups you can still continue through the often short levels with just regular shooting, but once you see the game’s influence over your activities it’s not as exhilarating to be performing the same stunts. Compared to a game like Stranglehold which had large areas with many interactable objects so it could be a playground of creativity, My Friend Pedro is a sequence of singular setups where player creativity doesn’t go too far. Your agency is limited mostly to pulling things off, pulling things off with a flourish like a spin or wall jump, or failing the setpiece. While this doesn’t rob the actions of their spectacle, it does mean My Friend Pedro isn’t going to hit the same highs as something more liberating, instead being a guided tour of fun ways to spice up gunplay.
THE VERDICT: While My Friend Pedro’s structure means you don’t really get to be creative with the over the top stunts and ridiculous bits of gun action, the creators were at least imaginative and you can bask in the spectacle of the game’s satisfying setpieces. A strange but enjoyable sense of humor is layered over an experience that happily breaks the bounds of reality to have your playable character flip around and land amazing shots, the player still being the one to execute them because of the allowances slow motion give to setting up such showstoppers. Some puzzles and gameplay shifts means My Friend Pedro gets to test its mechanics in other contexts as well, but if you’re coming to this exhilarating game for the flashy stunts, just remember many of them are as scripted as the action movie scenes they’re imitating.
And so, I give My Friend Pedro for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. Even when the guiding hand of the developers is obvious, it is still incredibly satisfying to pull off a sequence of elaborate stunts. My Friend Pedro’s flaws are mostly small things like how awkward the skateboard is to use or how the end of level highlight tends to show rather mundane actions instead of the stage’s best stunt, and since dealing with enemies still requires proper set up and execution, it’s not like My Friend Pedro is made a worse game by making its limited design easy to pick up on. My Friend Pedro is trying to feed into that rush of adrenaline you can get from doing something impressive and stylish, and while it doesn’t really set up a playground for you to explore how an area can be best handled, it still demands some skill to pull off each little setpiece. In fact, the way the game sometimes steps back from these prescribed stunts for the other gameplay styles is likely why they don’t feel too egregious in their obvious set-ups. Riding the motorcycle doesn’t have any set sequence of actions to perform, and puzzles can definitely get away with their single solution design better since you have to think more about what you’re doing.
Most of My Friend Pedro is the player participating in some performance art, the stage set for the visually impressive actions that seem to be ripped straight out of a film. You aren’t guaranteed to always hit your mark and there is difficulty in handling the enemies to ensure it’s not an unopposed power fantasy, so My Friend Pedro still delivers on an enjoyable and engaging gameplay experience. You may be following a script in a way as you play, but a script has the chance to be refined into something solid and enjoyable, and the action and humor in My Friend Pedro certainly come through because the structure is there to support them.