My Friend Pedro Review

It is my hope that I’m never cruel or hurtful with my reviews and opinions. I’ve learned enough about the games industry to know that most games are passion projects created by people who believe in their vision and want to see it in the world. I know it must take incredible determination and courage to make something from the heart and put it in front of the uncaring masses. For that reason, I try my best to see the good in every game and qualify my critiques. All of that being said, we need to talk about My Friend Pedro.

In My Friend Pedro, players take the roll of a masked, nameless amnesiac with a talent for gunplay. Upon waking up in the basement of a butcher shop, players meet Pedro, a floating talking banana who informs the player they’ve got to kill a lot of people. What follows is a parade of gunfire, backflips, and dead people as the player carves their way through the ranks of a criminal empire.

If you think that the concept of a silent amnesiac being told to go on murderous rampage by a likely imaginary character sounds familiar, it is. It’s the exact same premise as Hotline Miami, a game released by the publisher of My Friend Pedro in 2012. I’m not saying My Friend Pedro is a complete rip-off of Hotline Miami but the similarities feel like more than just inspiration. Obviously the first similarity is the overall setting, but My Friend Pedro also has a scoring system similar to Hotline Miami. Players earn points for each enemy they kill and are given extra points for making the kills more stylish, such as shooting two enemies at once or killing an enemy while in mid-air. Players are also rewarded if they get many kills in quick succession. Hotline Miami wasn’t the first game to score players on performance, but the other similarities in My Friend Pedro make it the first game to compare it to.

Fortunately, My Friend Pedro adds some new features of its own to the mix. Unfortunately, none of them are very good. Probably the most advertised feature of the game is the ability to shoot in two different directions at once. This is done by aiming at one location and locking onto it by holding down right click on PC or a shoulder button on the Switch. After locking one hand to aim at that target, the other hand is free to aim as normal. This is a cool idea and changing the aim of your off-hand is easy enough, however about 40% of the time I used this feature, it would break. Most of the time it would change to lock onto where I was already shooting with my primary aim, but sometimes just stopped working altogether. Because sections of the game are built around players needing to aim in two directions, that mechanic not working 100% of the time put me at a serious disadvantage and made playing not very fun. On top of all of this, only two of the seven weapons can be used in this way, and they are the weakest weapons, meaning players probably won’t elect to use them unless it’s absolutely necessary. I feel like if you’re going to develop a dual-wielding system, you may as well make plenty of ways to use it.

Another feature My Friend Pedro brings to the table is the ability to slow down time. With the press of a button, players enter Focus mode which slows down time. While Focusing, the main character will do some additional acrobatics in a fight, leading to better scores for kills and reduced chance to be hit. How long you can Focus is determined by the Focus Meter which slowly regenerates anytime the player is not in Focus mode, but is also filled by attacking and killing enemies even while in Focus mode, meaning that a skilled player could stretch out their slo-mo time with smart plays. Plenty of games have had slo-mo modes before, but I did appreciate how Focus gave a tangible bonus to players other than better reaction times.

Besides Focus and Dual-Wielding weapons, My Friend Pedro has a few other ideas, though they’re much smaller in scope. Players are able to Dodge, which results in a stylish spin, allowing players to move and shoot while avoiding damage, at the cost of accuracy. However, this dodge doesn’t work very well as there are parts at the beginning and end of the dodge animation where players can’t shoot or move accurately but are still taking damage. Beyond that, players can’t continue dodging by holding down the button, which doesn’t make sense because the protagonist could easily just keep spinning and it would look cool in the middle of a gun fight. There’s also a Kick which can kill enemies or propel environmental objects at enemies, typically killing them. Lastly, there are barrels and skateboards that can be ridden, but the controls feel inaccurate and the levels aren’t really designed for these things to be ridden for very long, limiting the player’s enjoyment of this system.

So, My Friend Pedro has some cool ideas that are either unoriginal or not well executed, but does it actually have any truly bad parts? Sadly, yes. It seems that while the developer was making frenzied shooting action game, they decided they also needed to mix in some platforming puzzles. I really wish they hadn’t made this choice, because these sections of the game are easily the worst parts. It was such a let down to be going along with the fast-paced gun mayhem only to have to immediately apply the breaks and start working on some precision jumping. Filled with lasers and attack drones, these platforming sections required players to be careful and contemplative, going against the mood of the entire rest of the game. They were such a poor fit and the controls felt so inadequate for these portions of the game, I often would just minimize the game and watch Netflix for a while instead of play through them.

My Friend Pedro is $17. That is not an insubstantial amount of money. For $17, you could go see a movie, get a decent meal, add a new item to your wardrobe, or just buy a different video game. Chances are, if you can think of something to do with $17, it would be a better use of that money than buying My Friend Pedro. I hope the everyone who worked on this game is proud of their work and learned more about making games, and I hope the people who do purchase My Friend Pedro have a good time, but I simply can’t recommend purchasing this game to any of my readers.

Don’t buy this game

I hate to say it, but there’s nothing here worth spending your money on