PAX West 2024: Pizza Bandit

There are so many different games to try when you’re making your rounds on the show floor of PAX West. From the smallest one-person indie studios to industry titans like Nintendo, from the biggest tabletop RPGs to the quickest card games, whatever you want to try will be represented in some way in the two Seattle Convention Centers. This can make it very difficult to actually decide what games to sit down and play because you can’t possibly dedicate yourself to all of them. If you’re covering the show, however, it can be hours of emails, game trailers, curation, scheduling, and double-guessing whether the games you picked were the right ones to spend time with, taking every little detail into account before making a final decision. 

Then a game called Pizza Bandit comes along and absolutely demands your attention. 

That’s the description given to me as I talked to some of the people from JOFSOFT, Pizza Bandit’s developer and publisher, as I stood in their booth surrounded by people. It seems my attention wasn’t the only one Pizza Bandit garnered, as the line was wrapped around the booth the entire time I was walking around PAX. It was just as long when I got there, and even longer when I left. Between the insane name, the glamorous neon-laden booth, the dozens of stacks of Pizza Bandit-branded pizza boxes surrounding each computer, and the total action-packed gore-fest on the screen, who could blame us? 

Then a game called Pizza Bandit comes along and absolutely demands your attention. 

While we waited for some of the computers to open up, I was given a bit more background on what the game is and where it all started. Pizza Bandit is a mission-based 4-player-cooperative third-person-shooter. You take control of a former bounty hunter whose second career is as a pizza restaurateur. After your retirement, you decided to make pizza pies instead of fighting baddies for cash, only to realize that those two skill sets don’t necessarily translate well. As your pizzeria starts to fail, you make the choice to don your bounty hunter garb once again and do whatever you can to save your doomed pizza shop. 

If you guessed that would include creating a time machine and invoking the wrath of time beings, fighting waves of time-traveling time reapers while crafting a pizza from scratch, and simultaneously fulfilling and sending out orders, you’d be right! Let me tell you that when the conversation with the JOFSOFT devs started with “ex-bounty hunter wants to start a restaurant” I did not think it would end with “time travel isn’t perfect, so you get the attention of time reapers.” That sort of mystique and abject weirdness is what I think put Pizza Bandit onto most peoples’ radars. Where the incredibly bizarre lore stops, the fun and addicting pizza gameplay loop begins. 

Each round of Pizza Bandit starts with all four players at a central hub where they choose weapon and gear load-outs (including a giant pizza-cutter that you use as a melee weapon, which is genius), and some basic character customization. I chose to leave my bounty hunter in a traditional pizza chef outfit, because of course I did, and added a mini-gun as my main weapon of choice. My three compatriots and I – random PAX goers who were complete team players – started making our first pizza, putting sauce on the dough, covering it in cheese, filling out the orders, loading it into the dispensers, and launching them off to be enjoyed.

Soon enough, time reapers (I believe they’re called “frankies” by the devs, but I could be wrong on that) appeared in waves to put a stop to our pizza pie antics. Wordlessly, two of my companions held off the time demons while my next-door PC neighbor and I set to continuing the pizza perfection. As we filled out the orders, more and more demanding customers stacked up among waves and waves of frankies. Pizza sauce mixed with the blood of our enemies in a beautiful coupling of cheesy gunpowder fury until we were able to extract and make it back to home base safe and sound. You can use the experience and money you earned during your mission to better upgrade your pizzeria, gaining a more worldly understanding of the unanimously-loved dish. It’s hectic, chaotic, and just plain fun. 

Pizza sauce mixed with the blood of our enemies in a beautiful coupling of cheesy gunpowder fury until we were able to extract and make it back to home base safe and sound.

The way Pizza Bandit came to be is fittingly hilarious. The devs had a build of the game during PAX 2023 that was about four months old, and it had a much more serious tone. The devs noticed that the biggest laughs were had at the expense of the singular pizza mission – a mission they threw in for fun, I might add – and it garnered the biggest crowds. Watching streamers play the game yielded similar results as most would go back and play the pizza mission at least one more time before calling it quits. They were working on a mission that involved clearing sewers out with a flamethrower when the devs got the call to scrap that and focus solely on the pizza gameplay, and much to the delight of the devs, they agreed. The rest is history. The dream of 6 people from South Korea took its final shape and I was able to reap the benefits on that fateful day at PAX. 

Pizza Bandit is an apt example of how unpredictable game development can be, especially at the indie level. You may start with one vision, and you may even think that vision is complete, but when you’re in the driver’s seat it turns out that you have no idea which direction the road will turn and what pizza-based adventures may very well be in your future. I highly commend JOFSOFT for listening to their community and pivoting as hard as they did in order to make one of the most unique shooters I’ve seen in a long time. If you enjoy a co-op shooter with friends that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is just a blast to play, keep an eye out for Pizza Bandit. It doesn’t have a release date just yet, but the devs are hopeful for it to hit virtual store shelves sometime next year. Until then, you can join their Discord and Wishlist the game on Steam.