Parents' Guide to My Friend Pedro

By giving you gymnastics skills and the ability to slow time, this old-school-style shooter makes you feel like you're Keanu Reeves in his best movies. In My Friend Pedro, you and your sentient floating banana pal Pedro have to shoot your way out of a butcher shop that's a front for organized crime. It's a good thing you have not only an endless supply of bullets, and your kicking shoes, but also some gymnastics skills and the ability to slow down time. This not only helps you shoot bad guys in hard to reach places, but also to survive when they have you surrounded. Or, to think of it another way: This is like if someone made a side-scrolling twin-stick arcade-style shooter about that time John Wick woke up in The Matrix.

In fact, it's when things start to get really clever and complicated and "Neo in the Matrix"-like that this shooter gets really good. While it's always fun to shoot bad guys while doing a slo-mo backwards jump, it's in the later levels, when you can do things like bank shots off hanging metal plates, that this becomes really challenging and satisfying. It's just too bad this isn't also available for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, since the Switch's controller doesn't work as well for this kind game, and playing on a PC's keyboard would be frustrating. Even so, with clever levels, the skills to complete them, and a talking banana, My Friend Pedro is an addictive and exciting shooter for anyone who wishes they were Keanu Reeves.