Overcooked, a title where you work with your friends to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:survive kitchen shifts at various restaurants despite the many challenges and hijinks thrown at you, is a stressful game. Call of Duty’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nazi Zombies mode, where you need to defend your fortress from invading monsters hell-bent on tearing you to shreds, is a stressf🍰ul game. Developer JofSoft asked itself, ‘What if we combined both of these stressful games into one extremely stres♒sful game?’ And so, Pizza Bandit, describing itself as ‘Overcooked meets Gears of War’ was born.

In Pizza Bandit, you’re a mercenary in a sci-fi action shooter, trying to retire so you can live out a quieter, less violent life of making ‘za at a fledgling restaurant. Business isn’t exactly booming, though, so you’ll need to return to your violent ways to earn some cash and finish a few missions to secure the monetary dough that allows you to make actual dough at your restaurant. But just because you’re off slaying monsters doesn’t mean you’re off the clock in the kitchen, since 𒐪168澳洲幸运5开奖网:there are still pizza orders coming your way as you shoot down invaders.

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The game is played in teams of four, and it’s🔥 up to players to divide and conquer to keep the restaurant safe and pizzas flowing. In my demo, the kitche𝓀n was on the second floor of the restaurant, and after a brief tutorial on how to prepare pizzas and crank out colas, the monsters descended to mess up our operations.

There are a few fail conditions for each level in Pizza Bandit &ndas⛄h; you’ll lose if all your teammates die (and friendly fire is on, so be careful where you aim), or if you stop putting out pizzas to prioritize staying alive and let too many orders fall by the wayside. Adding to the challenge, your pizzas burn if you leave them in the oven too long, the cola is stored in a totally separate area of the building, and the machines that completed orders go into would explode and damage us if we put in the wrong dish.

Before we set off, everyone got to customize their merc and choose which weapons to bring along for the mission.𒀰 I designed myself as a pink-haired cook in the traditional chef’s garb of a hat and pristine white jacket, but I also had a green robot arm I used to toss disco grenades at the invading monsters. I also had access to a mini-gun, turrets to place around the kitchen to protect me while I cooked, and plenty of different styles of weapons. Have you ever u🐽sed a pizza cutter to slice down mutants who are determined to tear you apart before the oven timer goes off? I have.

Pizza Bandit is a game that relies heavily on communication with your team, which was markedly difficult on a packed show floor wearing mic-less headphones. Before the mission started, our in-game text chat was full of jokes about pizza, how hungry we were for pizza, how tasty pizza sounded, what we would do for lunch after the demo (pizza), and so on. But since yo✤u’re far too busy once the mission 🥃begins to sit there typing out Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen “Gimme Pizza” lyrics, the chat log was impossible to use. Who has time to type when monsters are trying to tear you to pieces?

Filling an order in Pizza Bandit.

Interestingly, the restaurant options don’t start and end with pizza. As you level up and get better, you’ll be able to accept missions in other kinds of restaurants as well, with a revolving sushi bar and fancꦰy steakhouse available to play at much higher difficulty levels. Since my team and I got torn apart at the easiest level, it’♓s safe to say I won’t be serving Michelin star meals anytime too soon.

Developer JofSoft is eager to hear feedback from fans as the game develops, and so has an active Discord community and plenty of social media presence for you to tell them what you’d like brought into the game. The team told me they’d been at PAX East as well with a much smaller setup, but since they now had a perimeter made of pizzaඣ boxes and a bright neon sign on their booth reading “Pizza Saves, Bullets Kill” on the darkened show floor,🔥 it was almost impossible to miss them.

I&ඣrsꦅquo;m not very good at shooter games, but I really loved Pizza Bandit. I took up the helm as the chef, cranking out pepperoni and mushroom pizzas to our customers’ content while my nimbler teammates protected the base. Even when our final friend fell, everyone took off their headphones with smiles on our faces. Pizza Bandit is a silly concept that’s been executed at a delightfully high level, and I can’t wait to don my dirty chef’s hat again when the full game releases early next year.

PAX West Tag Page Cover Art
Location
Seattle Convention Center, Washington 🙈
Dates
🥂 ღ August 30 - September 2, 2024

PAX West began life as the Penny Arca♕🐼de Expo, a celebration of gaming culture hosted by the creators of the titular webcomic. Held in Seattle, it draws over 100,000 visitors.