I’ve seen a lot of games, with a lot of different plotlines and stories. A lot of them are fairly straightforward, but we’ve come a long way from simply rescuing the princess. So for this show, we are granting our first “TF Uniracers Award”, and will do so for all future shows. Why Uniracers? Because it had one of the most batsh*t insane plots I had ever experienced in my video gaming career – and I was 13 with an SNES. The premise was that a God, who had a crush on another God, tried to show how creative he was. The result was a universe where sentient unicycles would endlessly race each other on increasingly difficult tracks.
Yeah. It’s still fun as hell though.
In that spirit, we are awarding the Technical Fowl Uniracers Award for PAX West 2024 to JOFSOFT’s Pizza Bandit. Before we even get into the gameplay, the pitch itself should tell you why, as it was marketed to me as Overcooked meets Gears of War, and guess what? It 100% delivers.
(Pun not intended, but still served)
Pizza Bandit focuses on a mercenary with a love for things culinary, who dreams of running a successful pizza shop. The problem is, he’s terrible at it. Realizing he’s losing his shirt trying to poorly run his business, he has to go back to what he knows – bounty hunting though time, Yes, you read that correctly. Our hero takes bounties not just around the globe but temporally in his time machine ship, and uses the funds to finance his real passion, the restaurant.
This all happens in the form of a third-person 4 player co-op shooter (you can play with less), where mission success relies on everyone doing their job. The demo gameplay we got to drop into was fighting off hordes of monsters while – yes – making sure pizzas were made and delivered as ordered. So imagine a kitchen surrounded by bad guys. W0hile gunning them down with a customizable arsenal loadout, the Overcooked-style header comes up on the UI, letting you know what the next pizza order is. So there better be a division of player labor going to the corners of the room, picking up cheese, pepperoni and mushrooms, stacking them on the crust, setting it to bake, then when done dropping it into the delivery box to be fired off in time.
Oh by the way yes, that’s your HP dropping, better roll to evade and replace those mushrooms with your shotgun and get that monster off of your teammate who is a little busy taking a pie out of the oven. Or you need to get out of the way of your teammate trashing that time reaper coming up the stairs in front of you, because one of the perils is friendly fire. Yes, those bad guys are time reapers. The game keeps to some geek time travel lore as part of the game in this way, with the time reapers coming after you basically because you’re trying to mess with the timeline.
Not every mission is pizza related – while we did also see a sushi mission, some of them are more straightforward mercenary missions. The gameplay is fun with the custom weapon loadouts you can start your missions with – naturally different weapons will be better than others on specific missions, but that includes an array of firearms, swords and melee weapons, as well as a pizza cutter to stay on brand.
And a disco grenade. That i kept setting off accidentally*.
* yeah not accidentally at all
Pizza Bandit is coming soon in early 2025, and is early access on Steam right now. We had a blast in our demo gameplay and are proud that it is the inaugural recipient of our Uniracers award. We believe that you too will appreciate the batsh*t insanity, as well as inspiration for anyone out there that’s building up their side hustle. See more below:
