Armed with a handgun, sick-ass dance moves and a banana whispering in your ear, My Friend Pedro starts off with a masked protagonist ready to bullet-time kill literally every person on the planet.

My Friend Pedro (MFP), developed by DeadToast Entertainment and published by Devolver Digital, released June 20th. At the games core it is an action game that is built around bullet-time. Bullet-time is a mechanic that is incredibly fun because it provides, especially in MFP, ridiculous water-cooler moments for friends to talk about.

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The game starts off with an introduction on who you are trying to kill and why it matters so fucking much. The story is clichéd, forgettable and it is entirely okay to just never pay attention to it. In essence, there are bad guys and your told to stylishly shoot them until the game congratulates you for winning. There is also a tutorial on how to properly kill people with the gift of bullet-time, wall-jumping and general use of either the controller or the keyboard. Objects like zip-lines, frying pans and skateboard litter areas to add to the entertainment factor but feel less entertaining the more you use them.

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Everything is fine during the game up until moments when multiple enemies are on screen, the dual targeting mode gets a little wonky to pull off (at least for the PS4 controller). Level design is the key to success in a game like MFP and it succeeds in providing excellent level design for the first half of the game, where enemies are close quarters and in small numbers, but then it starts to peter out during the second half and the levels get longer and it gives the feeling you’ve been playing the same level over and over. Stairs are actually the bane of this game, they are so fucking miserable to navigate. The gun selection follows this same trend. The guns that you receive in the first half of the game fit the level design and make use of the close quarters combat, but during the second half, the guns get longer ranged and the adrenaline from the close quarters dissipates when the enemies feel less threatening because of their distance.

Graphics are not the main focus here which is fine by me. The environments look nice at times and the sewers looks like shit, so i mean, it works, I guess. The music is insane. It always makes the murder seem sweeter when there is some sweet-ass electronic/dance music to go along with it.

Do not get me wrong, My Friend Pedro is a damn fun game in its entirety but it feels like it promised so much and did not deliver. A lot of the game is super fun and it is satisfying to play levels over to achieve S rank. There is a lot of fun in wall-jumping, killing three guys then jumping off, bullet-timing off of a table and blowing a guys head off feels FANTASTIC. At the end of the day, when the game allows you to take full advantage of what it promised, My Friend Pedro exceeds all of my expectations.