Pizza Bandit Preview – Cheesy, Delicious Comfort Food

Have you ever played Overcooked and wondered, “Where’s the reload button? What about my grenades?” I know I have, and Pizza Bandit is here to solve all my problems with the co-operative chaotic cooking genre. 

In Pizza Bandit, you team up with three other people to shoot hordes of enemies, defend your restaurant, and sling some ‘za with rocket-powered delivery pods. 

It sounds like a silly premise that shouldn’t work, but that’s only half right: it is a silly premise. Much like pineapple and ham on pizza, it’s an unexpected yet pleasant combination that could be an addictive recipe when it fully launches. (Come at me in the comments down below.)

Pizza Bandit is set in a world where time travel is used for the most important act of service: preparing and delivering food to hungry people. In the level we played, it featured a simple pizza station with options for mushroom or pepperoni pizza. 

Like Overcooked, you bring each ingredient to a station, then take the prepared food to an oven to cook for a few seconds. If you don’t remove the pizza from the oven in time, though, it will burn.

Then you load up a delivery pod with the pizza, along with a case of beer or soda, depending on the order. Of course, most orders also require a side of bullets. 

Pizza Bandit is a very serious game for very serious people. 

Luckily, you’ve got more than enough ammo to spare—after all, it takes a lot of bullets to mow down the hordes of enemies that teleport in to disrupt your cooking. The gunplay isn’t anything revolutionary, but it works nicely for what Pizza Bandit is trying to do.

Before loading into the level, you choose a loadout consisting of primary, secondary, and melee weapons, and two pieces of equipment. The primaries and secondaries were guns as you’d expect, and some equipment included placeable turrets or grenades. 

However, the game gets silly with its options too. My melee weapon was a giant pizza cutter that looked more like a power tool, and one of my throwables was a disco ball that explodes after playing some sweet tunes. 

If it’s not obvious by now, Pizza Bandit is a very serious game for very serious people. The show floor demo at PAX West was likely set on an easy difficulty, so it was a breeze mowing down enemies and getting the pizzas shipped. 

However, Executive Producer Aron Koh shed some light on how much harder Pizza Bandit could get. There are higher difficulty levels which introduce more challenging enemies while scaling their health and damage more. 

I didn’t try any of the harder difficulties myself, but much like with Helldivers 2, I’m hoping it only takes a few rounds for the group to dial into the proper challenge.

Additionally, there are other missions types available, so it's not all a pizza-making mess. I saw footage of players running a sushi restaurant, and other gameplay screenshots showcased a mission where players have to defend a drill as it breaches a vault.

Overall though, I think the general approach JOFSOFT has taken with Pizza Bandit makes for an appealing, easy-to-get game. Its two major slices inspired by other genres have been simplified, but the sum of its parts transforms it into something greater. 

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TechRaptor previewed Pizza Bandit at PAX West 2024.