Pizza Bandit is a co-op horde shooter where you must cook food while shooting monsters, all to build your dream pizzeria. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the demo, and more.
Everything We Know About Pizza Bandit
Pizza Bandit Plot
You play as Malik, a battle-hardened ex-mercenary burdened with an unusual curse: the dream of becoming a chef. To fund his culinary ambitions, he takes on outrageous bounties, earning money, gathering loot, and uncovering new recipes along the way. Every contract cleared not only sharpens his skills in the kitchen but also brings him one step closer to opening the restaurant he’s always dreamed of.
Pizza Bandit Gameplay
Imagine if a cooking show and a third-person shooter collided—Pizza Bandit is the glorious mess that comes out the other side. This mission-driven, four-player co-op romp puts you in the boots of a retired mercenary with an oddly wholesome ambition: running the best pizzeria the galaxy has ever seen.
Of course, dreams don’t come cheap. Armed with time-travel gadgets and an overabundance of firepower, you’ll leap across chaotic eras, hunt down dangerous bounties, and serve up meals under the most absurd pressure imaginable. Whether it’s tossing dough in the middle of a firefight or spicing up your takedowns with a little flair, every mission is a recipe equal parts disaster and destiny—your destiny as the galaxy’s ultimate pizza chef.
Pizza Bandit Release Date
Pizza Bandit released on Steam Early Access this August 25, 2025. It will remain on Early Access before launching its 1.0 update in 2026, alongside a console release.
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 Steam |
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| $24.99 |
Pizza Bandit Review (Demo)
A Tasty Start to a Bloody Party
Have you ever played a round of Plate Up and thought, “Hmm, it’d be nice if I could shoot some zombies at the same time”? You’d be in rare company, sure, but not entirely alone, because the developers of Pizza Bandit clearly had the same idea and decided to run with it because here we are.
As you might have guessed, Pizza Bandit fuses the frantic, kitchen-centered mess of games like Plate Up and Overcooked with the relentless horde-shooting action of Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead. The result is a game that delivers far more chaos and fun than its premise suggests, though not without leaving behind plenty of rough edges.
The premise is this: you’re a time-traveling bounty hunter, armed with guns, grenades, high-tech gadgets, and, of course, a winning smile. Yet beneath all that firepower lies a surprisingly simple dream—owning your very own pizzeria, something you’ve longed for since childhood. After years of saving, you finally make it happen, buying a shop and preparing to serve piping-hot pizza to the hungry crowds of the late 2300s.
There’s just one problem. The fine print—yes, that fine print you didn’t bother reading because you were too enamored with the part where you’re finally achieving your dreams—reveals that your shiny new restaurant doesn’t actually come with most of the equipment it needs to run (besides the pizza oven and some chairs). By the time you realize this, your savings are gone, and the only option left is to strap your gear back on, return to bounty hunting, and earn the cash needed to turn your half-empty store into the pizza empire of your dreams.
Fortunately, your time spent on both the battlefield and in the kitchen has prepared you for a whole new kind of mission. And no, it’s not cooking the enemies you gun down—that would be wildly unhygienic. Instead, the game casts you as a kind of combat chef, tasked with serving food to hungry customers while simultaneously defending them (and, more importantly, the food) from relentless hordes of monsters known as Time Reapers.
The Concept Is Nuts, and the Pizza Is, Too
That, in essence, is the core of the game and what most of your missions revolve around. Is it insane? Absolutely. But insanity works more often than not, and you hardly need a compelling narrative reason to enjoy a fun co-op title with friends. Contra was a blast, so was Metal Slug and PEAK—and none of those required much in the way of explanation.
In fact, I would argue that co-op-driven games are often better off without heavy-handed worldbuilding or elaborate storytelling, aside from the occasional bit of lore tucked into hubs or stages. Deep Rock Galactic, for example, offered little more than a barebones prologue and virtually no cutscenes, yet it remains (at least in my opinion) one of the best co-op experiences ever made.
With that in mind, Pizza Bandit already feels like it’s in a fine place, offering only a brief prologue to set the stage and a handful of story cutscenes scattered here and there, but mostly at the beginning. Unless a full-fledged campaign mode is added—which seems unlikely—it does not really need more than that.
Gameplay? Glorious. Food? Delicious.
A typical Pizza Bandit run is straightforward enough that you could memorize the loop after a single try: cook some food, fend off monsters, and get out. Of course, there are variations like having to gather ingredients elsewhere or process them in a specific order, but at its core, the thrill lies in the co-op chaos and the unpredictability of working together under pressure.
If you’ve played Plate Up or Overcooked, you already know the kind of frantic experience to expect. But Pizza Bandit raises it to the next level by throwing in horde-shooter mechanics. Now it’s not just about keeping up with orders or watching the time; you’re also watching for friendly fire (because of course it has that), making sure teammates are actually pulling their weight, and scrambling to revive whoever inevitably gets downed.
You can try to plan ahead by mixing up your loadouts—from trusty assault rifles to miniguns or even swords—and compensate with gadgets like stationary turrets. But plans rarely survive contact with reality. Someone will miss a dodge, two people will accidentally cook the same dish, or a misplaced shot will take down an unfortunate soul. And yet, that unpredictability is exactly what makes co-op games like this so entertaining.
Heck, I remember making only sushi rolls because I was the nearest one to the station, only to later realize that my randomly-matched ally was focusing on defending me and not cooking the other items. Rookie mistake!
Even the Mechanics are Refreshingly Simple
To avoid becoming dead weight in the party, you need to master every tool at your disposal and show the Time Reapers that nothing stands between you and your dream pizzeria. That said, your arsenal is fairly modest: a primary weapon, a sidearm, a melee option, an installation, and a handful of grenades. As for healing, forget medkits—you call in an airdrop of pizza and chow down mid-battle.
Your mobility is equally straightforward. You can sprint and perform combat rolls, and thankfully there’s no stamina bar to hold you back. But beyond that, don’t expect fancy tricks—no sliding, no parkour, not even a double jump. And honestly, that’s perfectly fine.
The stripped-down mechanics mean you can actually master what’s there instead of fumbling through a dozen half-baked options. It keeps the focus on keeping supply lines steady and, more importantly, avoiding the classic blunder of shooting your teammate in the face while they’re hunched over making sushi or something equally "vital."
Be the Stylish Chef You Aspire to Be
Right from the start, Pizza Bandit gives you a surprisingly solid wardrobe of clothing and accessories—sometimes gritty, but more often than not, outright comedic. The catalog expands as you spend in-game currency, ranging from masks and all manner of augmented arms to the truly difficult choice of whether to carry three gallons of milk on your back or a giant teddy bear. Unfortunately, you can’t customize gender or body shape just yet, though I’d fully expect to run into more than a few Shrek cosplayers once that option arrives.
Even better, you can deck out your pizzeria with furniture and décor of all kinds: lights, TVs, vending machines, art pieces, and more. None of it really matters for gameplay, but that’s hardly the point. Looking stylish doesn’t improve your aim either, yet I would argue that being cool beats being good. You finally own your dream pizzeria, and with full control over its design, you might as well go wild.
All in all, Pizza Bandit is shaping up to be an excellent co-op experience, even in its early state. Sure, there are still kinks to work out, like sound effects randomly cutting out, optimization issues that tank the frame rate, and crashes when closing the game. But for what it is right now, it shows a ton of promise—and is absolutely worth checking out.
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Pizza Bandit Product Information
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| Title | PIZZA BANDIT |
|---|---|
| Release Date | August 25, 2025 (Early Access) |
| Developer | JOFSOFT |
| Publisher | JOFSOFT, KRAFTON, Inc. |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Shooter, Co-op |
| Number of Players | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating | TBA |
| Official Website | Pizza Bandit Official Website |
