Thank you to JOFSOFT for sending us this game to preview!

Pizza Bandit is a co-op third-person shooter from JOFSOFT and co-published by KRAFTON, of PUBG fame. Billing itself as a high-pressure experience that combines PvE combat with cooking mechanics, it promises both third-person action and… pizza making? Sure enough, you’re not just a bounty hunter that can travel across space and time, but a wannabe pizza chef. When you’re not out on a bounty, you can focus on decorating and running your own pizza joint in the central hub. This hub is where you’ll also accept bounties, get rewards, assemble your own arsenal of weapons and utilities, change your appearance, and more. This might make it sound like a management game, but I’ll burst your bubble by saying that you won’t get any customers for your pizza—only you and your friends. Pizzas are made from items gathered from bounties, and give you buffs for your next run like increased health, damage, stamina, etc.

So, that explains the pizza part of Pizza Bandit. But what about the bandit part? Similar to series like Payday, Helldivers, and Left 4 Dead, Pizza Bandit is a shooter based around dropping into a map and surviving a hoard of enemies while completing an objective, or in this case, a bounty. Bounties are key to getting new blueprints for weapons, gathering items for pizzas or crafting weapons, and getting credits for cosmetics and other upgrades. But bounties are open to anyone, and while you and your friends attempt to succeed at these missions, you’ll be hounded by time reapers—other bounty hunters from across time. Bounties can take place on a series of maps, with each map having one mission from three general mission types: cooking, assistance, or retrieval. You might be asked to cook sushi for customers while time reapers invade, help two guys with making meth and hiding it amongst cooked chicken, or infiltrate an Egyptian temple to steal a sarcophagus with jetpacks. No matter the objective, time reapers will be coming at you in waves to keep you from completing it, and you’ll have to balance focusing on your tasks with the ever-present threat of assault. The first time reapers you encounter will be simple enemies that take your bullets without much issue, but as you keep playing, you’ll face beefier enemies with natural armor, protective shields, stronger attacks, and larger health pools. You can equip different utility items like mines that do extra damage to enemy armor, or you can slowly chip them down with your guns.

Time reapers drop resources for the player needed mid-run like ammo, but they also drop things like canned goods and crafting materials, which are then used for pizzas or weapons and utilities. This means that all aspects of the game are meant to feed back into the combat system and improve it. To this extent, I’d say the gunplay is fine. It has good bones, and the movement system adds some life to the combat, but poor character animations, lack of enemy reactions to your attacks, and mediocre sound effects culminate in a feeling of weightless combat. Melee combat is especially guilty of this, as swinging with weapons results in your character awkwardly pausing their animation if they make contact with an enemy, and locking you in place for two seconds, regardless of if the attack hits or not.

While the game sells you on the idea of running your own shop making pizzas and killing bounty hunters, cooking is only one of a few mission types, and your pizza shop is irrelevant except for combat buffs. Additionally, the objectives that require your active engagement feel detrimental to the combat, doubly so for cooking objectives. These objectives are usually time-limited and require the player to be undisturbed for 5-10 seconds while enemies constantly chase after you, perform AOE attacks, or shoot projectiles at you. The waves of enemies continually reset your progress in the objectives, while generally being a nuisance. To give a comparison to something like Helldivers 2, it would be like that game asking you to do ten terminal inputs within three minutes to complete an objective while enemies constantly drop on you. This could be better in 4-player co-op, but as it was only myself and a friend playing the game, I can only judge it based on that.

Beyond the character animations, the game lacks cohesive vision. Levels take place in locations ranging from Mexican countryside, to ancient Egypt, to a Japanese resort, to American cityscape, a futuristic cyberpunk city, a circus, and so on, but they don’t feel like they were selected for a purpose. There isn’t a cohesive identity connecting these locations. A similar dichotomy is seen between the players and the time reapers. You play as humans who are contracted by the Big Shot network to perform bounties across space and time, but the time reapers, who are supposed to be bounty hunters similar to you, are instead portrayed as augmented, fleshy zombies differing in size and shape. Models and objects are a mess of styles and settings, while textures range in quality greatly. Lighting in general is unimpressive unless using Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen, which is used for global illumination and reflections. Performance can tank during intense fights, but overall is acceptable without justifying its heavy usage, which isn’t surprising for a Unreal Engine 5 game. Visual effects on collectible items clash with the setting no matter which map you choose, with bright, glowing icons highlighting dropped materials. UI design is clunky and dull, but functional. Adding all these things together, I can only think of one way to describe this game, though it can be a harsh term to use: asset flip.

This is not helped by the inconsistent sound design. The few weapons I tried sounded fine, but enemy sound effects quickly got repetitive, while other sound effects are similarly inoffensive and mundane, with a general lack of ambience. One thing that stood out to me and my friend, though, was the soundtrack. It was actually pretty nice, even though each level had a completely different vibe. But we noticed that parts of the songs sounded a bit… wispy? Something was just a bit off. So, we checked the Steam page, and sure enough, generative AI was used for music for the game. Though they claim it is only for player-selected music (likely the jukebox full of songs that you can purchase for your pizza shop), I have no reason to believe these songs were not also AI, given that no composer or credited rights were in the game’s credits.

Finally, we get to the moral section of the review. You are accompanied by an agent on most of your missions who speaks to you about them, and he can occasionally use strong language (such as the F-bomb). Enemies can be dismembered by melee weapons or when shot, but the dismemberment is less graphic and more comical, while both you and the enemies splatter blood when shot. There is no sexual content in the game.

Pizza Bandit is a game with a bizarre mixture of themes and mechanics that fails to live up to the promise of its marketing. Although some fun can be had shooting and slicing up time reapers while doing bounties collecting items, helping NPCs, or cooking up food, I find it lacks the polish or identity to keep players invested. It’s in a similar place to a game I reviewed previously, Alpha Protocol: there isn’t much reason to play this over its inspirations, which also serve as its competitors. On a sale, with a group of friends looking to dump a few hours into a game and then move on, this could be a game for you. But otherwise, I don’t recommend it.