You can get shot a lot and your partially depleted health segments will re-charge afterwards, and checkpoints are frequent so there's no real inconvenience when you die, but in a game about performing marvelous acrobatic feats, being clumsy is a kind of death of its own. You can't aim accurately while spinning, understandably, and the spin move is limited by some unclear cooldown and duration such that it feels inevitable, or at least partially determined by luck, whether you still get hit by a few bullets. You'll quickly realise that your enemies fire in bursts, and so there's an intended rhythm in which you're meant to alternate spins with returning fire. The game offers an answer to this in the form of a spinning-dodge maneuver during which no bullet will touch you. Soon, the enemies are strong or numerous enough that simple slow-mo dive-shooting won't allow you to avoid being shot. The game then spends the remainder of its duration trying and mostly failing to find ways to liven it up again. There are whole levels based around skateboarding, in which you can momentarily string together jumps, kicks, and gunfire, and it's gleefully silly.Īfter you've done these things a couple of times and recreated that GIF for yourself, however, their appeal fades. There's no challenge to this, but it is fun simply because it is novel and looks great. There are areas where you'll find a frying pan, for example, which you can kick into the air, slow time, and bounce bullets against in order to take out enemies around corners. It's always prescriptive, in that you do the thing the level designer has built for you to do, but this is the game at its best. The game quickly layers on new abilities via its level design however: hooks, hoists and ziplines to suspend yourself from metal objects to ricochet bullets off barrels to run on top of like in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. At the game's most straightforward, you'll then press a button to slip into slow motion, dive forwards over that ledge and blow those enemies away before they can return fire. If you're holding twin pistols or Uzis, you can right-click on one of those enemies to lock-on with one of your guns and separate your aim by left clicking elsewhere with your reticule. This turns out to be enough to get excited about.Ī typical area in My Friend Pedro will place you on the ledge above a room containing three enemies. Pedro contains warehouses (and many other grey locations), and hundreds of goons, but also has 3D animation blending. My Friend Pedro, meanwhile, is a grown-up version of browser Flash games I played as a teen, in which a stickman or perhaps a paper cut-out Keanu takes on warehouses filled with identical goons. Max Payne allowed you to experience this in fleeting moments, and SUPERHOT probably gets closest to capturing it consistently. The fantasy is that you can combine the bombast and messiness of guns with the grace of a martial art, and somehow be the choreographer of this murder ballet. The GIFs are incredible because they seem to realise a particular fantasy, one shared by anyone who spent their teenage years watching The Matrix over and over again. I can also confirm that these moves don't feel as good to perform as they look in motion, and that the game fails to support or develop its moveset in interesting ways. Now that I've played this run-and-gun platformer for myself I can confirm that this is one of many spectacular moves it allows you to smoothly and frequently execute. That's how I first encountered it, via a short clip which showed a man in a mask, hanging upside down from a zipline while he fired twin pistols in opposite directions. My Friend Pedro looks incredible in animated GIFs.
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