Pizza Bandit

The concept of Pizza Bandit is something I would be totally into, a comical co-op game where you have to balance cooking with fighting. Unfortunately this is neither funny or challenging. Due to the limited player base at the moment you either play solo or ensure you have three friends available upfront who REALLY want to play this. Solo play is underwhelming and my guess is it won't be much better with a crew onboard for team play. My whole 10 hours in game has been solo. The first level, Sushi Showdown seems promising. You start out in a Japanese themed restaurant collecting a limited amount of ingredients to make 3 kinds of sushi rolls for impatient customers while getting attacked by sci-fi mutants. The gameplay loop quickly becomes predictable and unsatisfying as everything is on a timer. Loitering around after the main objective is achieved will allow for collecting more loot, which frequently ends up dropping out of bounds and out of reach. Frustrating. Upon successful completion of a level more new ones open up. But they are all quite small and many don't have much to do with cooking. Bit of a let down there and a damn shame. Guns all feel entirely weak at the beginning of the game. With some eventual add-ons they then rapidly start to become overpowered. Either way the balancing is off. The time it takes to reload sucks and just about anything will interrupt that sequence from completing. You'll constantly end up on fire and need to do the stop/drop/roll thing all over the map to put yourself out. Landmines don't work most of the time so from a defensive standpoint you cannot really come up with any tactical plan to give yourself a little more time for culinary action in the kitchen. Your home base is a bit of a doll house. It's a defunct pizza parlor that you have to spend resources on to equip and furnish. The payoff is a handful of useless perks. During missions you can collect pizza recipes and items to make pizza at your place which will grant a buff to take into the next fight. But it's all just sort of meh. No real incentive to keep going. There doesn't seem to be any option for team or solo pizza delivery missions from your place which might have been a nice way to provide more mission variety and keep players engaged longer term. As it is now I rate Pizza Bandit as a miss, not a hit.