One of the time-honored traditions of PAX is sitting in the press room between appointments, giving your dogs a chance to stop barking, meeting new people, and chatting with friends old and new about the coolest games on the show floor. This year, one name came up over and over again: Pizza Bandit. And everyone I knew assured me it was right up my alley.
They were right. If you’ve never heard of it, Pizza Bandit is best explained as a mash-up of Gears of War’s Horde mode and Overcooked. Also, there’s time travel. That may sound bonkers, but it actually works. And more to the point, it’s a helluva lot of fun.
I shared my time with Pizza Bandit with three other players. Once we were squaded up, we took a couple minutes to choose our weapons and customize our characters. I gave my bounty hunter a chef’s hat and ninja mask and tweaked my loadout — I ended up rolling with an assault rifle, shotgun, and sniper rifle, as well as a katana for close encounters, a pair of deployable turrets, and a disco ball grenade that pulls enemies in before exploding. In a better timeline, I had the good sense to choose an oversized pizza cutter for my melee weapon, but this timeline ain't that one. So it goes. Once our group was kitted out, we hopped onto a dropship and deployed.
The mission I played dropped our motley crew into a pizza joint. Our mission was simple: prepare care packages of pizza, drinks, and bullets for our comrades in other timelines, and ship them off while taking out hordes of reapers bent on killing all of us. Like in Overcooked, you’ve got to make the right orders. Every box needs bullets, but if you put soda in and you’ve ordered beer, you’ll mess your order up and have to start again. In that same vein, you’ve gotta cook the right pizza. That means combining dough, cheese, and in our case, either mushrooms or pepperoni. Deliver the wrong one, and you’re out of luck. Burn it, and you’ve got to dump it in the trash and start again.
That’s the Overcooked bit. Then there’s the Gears of War bit. See, while you’re managing the kitchen, you’ve also got to fight off time reapers who really, really want you dead. So you’ve got a roll to get you out of trouble and put out fire if you’re burning, your guns, and your wits. But there are a lot of reapers to deal with, even for a four-person team. You’ll have to manage getting your orders right and out on time and deal with everyone that’s trying to kill you. Oh, and you have to watch your ammo and stay alive while you’re doing it. Deliver all your orders before messing too many up and stay alive, and you’ll have to escape to your ship for extraction.
The result is a fast-paced, exhilarating team-based shooter that combines the best parts of two beloved games to make something wholly unique and completely its own. Pizza Bandit is still early in development and JOFSOFT, the studio cooking all this up, will be the first to tell you there's a lot of work left to do, but playing it with a group was a blast, even when we didn’t initially know what we were doing. I can only imagine how much fun it’ll be with four friends while we’re screaming at each other about orders and tossing disco grenades. It’s a satisfying combination of shooting and cooking that feels good to play and better to play around with. I can only hope JOFSOFT sticks the landing because a world where time-traveling bounty hunters make New York-style pies and kill monsters is pretty rad. Pizza heals, bullets kill, and this concept rules. I can’t wait to play more Pizza Bandit, deliver more pies, and take out more baddies while wearing a chef's hat. Those time reapers don't stand a chance.
This preview is based on the demo provided by the publisher on the show floor at PAX West 2024.
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replyWill Borger posted a new article, Pizza Bandit fuses Gears of War and Overcooked into a delicious slice of New York pie
