'My Friend Pedro' is the stylish action game every Nintendo Switch owner needs

You know that Hollywood action moment where time slows down as our hero sails through the air, stylishly taking out a group of baddies while bullets whiz by? That's My Friend Pedro, summed up.

DeadToast Entertainment's new side-scrolling action game is all about finding creative ways to murder bad guys. You can activate slow-mo with a button press, and the more you do to make the most of your bullet time -- by building your kill count, naturally -- the longer you get to linger there.

It's a tough thing to describe using just words, honestly. My Friend Pedro is a playground as much as it is a game. The trick to each combat sequence is finding the various ways you can use the surrounding environment to your murderous advantage.

And yeah, it's one thing to say "I sent a frying pan flying through the air and shot at it, with the ricocheted bullets taking out one bad guy. Then I kicked the pan again, right into another bad guy's head." But it's quite another to actually see that scene play out....

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My Friend Pedro is filled with these moments. That's the whole point, and the purpose of the game. You're writing your own action scenes on the fly, driven by instinct. You've got a sizable arsenal to lean on, and can even dual-wield -- and line up two targets separately -- the smaller guns, for extra badassery.

There are inescapable sloppy moments where you accidentally turn off slow-mo at the wrong time or stick with boring, old bullets when the scene is filled with opportunities for creative environmental kills. But that's also where the replay value comes in. Your push through each stage is graded based on how much of a stylish badass you were, so there's a reason to dive back in, learn layouts, and build ever-better murder mousetraps.

Visually, My Friend Pedro has the look of a colorized modern noir with a dash of Saturday morning cartoon thrown in. Brightly colored characters -- both your nameless anti-hero and the hundreds of jerks he guns down -- stand out clearly against the beautifully rendered and lit backgrounds.

There's a madcap story in which you're sent off on a quest for vengeance by a floating, talking banana -- the Pedro referenced in the title. It starts off in a relatively normal manner, but the weirdness escalates as you progress deeper into the story.

I won't spoil the specifics, but the weirdness is more than set dressing. You'll eventually find yourself facing off against ugly Christmas sweater-wearing bounty hunters and sword-swinging LARPers. Some stages toy with the ways you can and can't move through the world. Others premise your principal foe around some completely ridiculous, darkest timeline nonsense.

There's even a motorcycle level. It's not particularly challenging, but it's a blast as changes of pace go. Skateboarding levels are the best, though.

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Nintendo Switch is a great home for My Friend Pedro, which lends itself well to quick bursts of play and longer sessions both. But a Switch in portable mode isn't necessarily the ideal option for perfecting your stylish rampage.

For one, the smaller screen sometimes makes it difficult to pick up on objects you can interact with until you're close enough for a button prompt to appear. I can't tell you how many times I cleared a room with my guns, only to discover immediately after that there was a frying pan or some other everyday object I could have weaponized.

My Friend Pedro is also a tense game, especially when you're trying to weave together an epic slow-mo shootout. You turn bullet-time on and off by pressing the left thumbstick (L3). At least once per level I'd screw up and grip my Switch too tightly, accidentally pressing the thumbstick in the process.

It's nothing a person couldn't adjust to, of course. My Friend Pedro is more strategic than it appears to be initially. I spent more of my playthrough in slow-mo than out of it because giving yourself the breathing space to read a scene and take advantage of how it's built is essential to scoring high at the end of a level.

I mean, just look at this nonsense.

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I've seen people compare My Friend Pedro to Hotline Miami, and I get it. But personally, I think this game defies easy comparisons like that. The closest I get it "playable Hollywood action sequence" but even that feels off in a way that undersells what it feels like to actually play the game.

My Friend Pedro is one of the most exciting and well-executed Switch indies released to date, and easily one of the strongest options in 2019 so far. It leaves the first impression of a fun game that doesn't require a whole lot of thought, but the deeper you go the more it establishes itself as a standout.

You can pick up My Friend Pedro in the Switch eShop starting June 20.