Some of the most pleasurable mindless violence this side of Hotline Miami. My Friend Pedro is built on a perfect intersection of simple and satisfying, with levels made to facilitate moments that somehow feel just as cool as they look and never get old.
One moment you're backflipping off a skateboard and through a window in bullet time before taking out two guys at once by firing your dual pistols in different directions, next you're kicking a frying pan across the room then ricocheting a bullet off it in mid air to get the guy hiding behind cover - all done organically with real-time physics and underscored by a hammering EDM soundtrack. It's the kind of audio-visual stimulus overload our ape cerebellums are built to seek and get instantly fried by. Every gun feels great too.
Sure the dice are a bit weighted in favor of raditude - you know, for example, that richochets will almost always land in your favor while blasting sewer-dwelling mutant gamers, but this just enables you to blaze through with the exaggerated swagger of a John Wick.
It's the only game in recent memory that I've wished was longer, though it does get a little more uneven as it goes on. A few levels forego combat altogether, opting for puzzle-platforming. While these bits are pleasantly retro in design (possibly owing to its Flash game origins, also something that bleeds through in its enjoyably stupid plot) and I detected some heavy Oddworld influence in the more intense sequences, at best they feel like interludes between the real gameplay and will have one itching to get back to the fireworks factory.
The other fumble for me are the S ranks, the requirements being so brutal it squeezes most of the fun and just became frustrating. You can rush through a level taking out every enemy in a perfectly strung combo chain and still only land an A-rank. The time requirements are so strict that every little physics snag or a moving platform being a micrometer farther away than convenient ruins your run and means you're punished for use of bullet time, disabling probably the game's single funnest element. Some lunatics surely loved the trial-and-error perfectionism but I gave up on S-ranking most levels quickly for fear of ripping out some hair.
That's a minor gripe overall though and I'll no doubt replay through these levels many more times regardless of what rank I get. Victor Ågren, if you're reading this please make a sequel and inject it directly into my eyeballs.
One moment you're backflipping off a skateboard and through a window in bullet time before taking out two guys at once by firing your dual pistols in different directions, next you're kicking a frying pan across the room then ricocheting a bullet off it in mid air to get the guy hiding behind cover - all done organically with real-time physics and underscored by a hammering EDM soundtrack. It's the kind of audio-visual stimulus overload our ape cerebellums are built to seek and get instantly fried by. Every gun feels great too.
Sure the dice are a bit weighted in favor of raditude - you know, for example, that richochets will almost always land in your favor while blasting sewer-dwelling mutant gamers, but this just enables you to blaze through with the exaggerated swagger of a John Wick.
It's the only game in recent memory that I've wished was longer, though it does get a little more uneven as it goes on. A few levels forego combat altogether, opting for puzzle-platforming. While these bits are pleasantly retro in design (possibly owing to its Flash game origins, also something that bleeds through in its enjoyably stupid plot) and I detected some heavy Oddworld influence in the more intense sequences, at best they feel like interludes between the real gameplay and will have one itching to get back to the fireworks factory.
The other fumble for me are the S ranks, the requirements being so brutal it squeezes most of the fun and just became frustrating. You can rush through a level taking out every enemy in a perfectly strung combo chain and still only land an A-rank. The time requirements are so strict that every little physics snag or a moving platform being a micrometer farther away than convenient ruins your run and means you're punished for use of bullet time, disabling probably the game's single funnest element. Some lunatics surely loved the trial-and-error perfectionism but I gave up on S-ranking most levels quickly for fear of ripping out some hair.
That's a minor gripe overall though and I'll no doubt replay through these levels many more times regardless of what rank I get. Victor Ågren, if you're reading this please make a sequel and inject it directly into my eyeballs.