Black Friday: The Game (PC)

While many holidays have been criticized for being too consumerist, there is only one day on the calendar that really feels like it’s purely a celebration of American capitalism: Black Friday. While the intentions of deal-chasers on this post-Thanksgiving sale explosion are often tied to facilitating the selfless gifting of upcoming holidays, Black Friday became infamous for the exaggerated reports of rabid, violent buyers doing whatever it takes to snag a sale item. Black Friday: The Game certainly has its work cut out for it when it comes to a satirical action game based around this shopping frenzy, but in actuality, it doesn’t capture any of the imagined insanity.

Black Friday: The Game doesn’t involve any door-busting mayhem or frantic fights for big ticket items. Instead, it’s a remarkably slow top-down Rogue-like shooter that clearly draws some inspiration from genre hits like The Binding of Isaac. Taking place in an infinitely large shopping center, each room has a randomized layout but shares the simple goal of grabbing whatever item is glowing yellow and taking it to the cash register to open the doors and let you into the next room. Almost paradoxically, your money goes up whenever you successfully grab a sale item, and by shooting any other shoppers into submission with your ketchup bottle, you can earn more cash, this being both a scoring system and a way of purchasing upgrades that are available every few rooms. If the other shoppers manage to completely deplete your life bar, your run comes to a close, the next shopping trip starting from the very beginning and requiring you to push through newly randomized rooms and purchase the upgrades you lost through your death.

This groundwork isn’t flawed conceptually and could work with the right amount of enemy variety, unique upgrades, and different room designs, but these are instead the areas where this game fails hard. First and foremost are the enemies. While the room layouts are randomized, they do follow some trends based on how far along you are on your adventure, the game changing their visual style and throwing in tougher baddies the longer you last. Your fellow shoppers, however, aren’t really a good form of resistance. Their ability to detect your presence is already limited, meaning you can walk in a room and just finding them standing there with nothing to do, but based on what their attack type is, they can vary from pushovers to enemies who don’t match the randomized room patterns well. Two variations on purse throwing grannies are the simplest enemies and almost always easy to outmaneuver, your ability to aim in four direction around you more than enough for you to either back up and fire, circle around them, or just avoid their slow attack pattern. The ridiculously obese men on scooters, conversely, can’t really be avoided, but even though they’ll zoom towards you quickly enough to hit you, they deal no damage, instead mostly bumping you into a corner so some other enemy can hurt you. The burly shopper requires physical contact to damage you and comes at you slower than the Rascal riders, and the last enemy type is a buxom socialite who calls in chihuahuas occasionally who will home in on you and bite you. The chihuahua spawning is clearly meant to be anchored on her but can appear from other locations if the room layout messes things up, but almost every enemy can be handled adequately enough if not for the complications of the room layouts.

The randomization on where shelves and crates are placed really doesn’t account for enemy placement at all, and even if it did, when you enter a room, sometimes the game will place enemies right beside that entrance. Most of the trouble you’ll have with the aggressive rival shoppers is not their design, but the fact you entered a room poorly suited for a fight with them. You might not have the room to escape thanks to bad barrier placement, or the enemies might be clustered in a way that guarantees some damage as you enter. The target item and the register always trend towards corners thankfully, but the placement of other objects pretty much just makes sure things do technically have space between them without considering what they are. A muscly shopper between two shelves is essentially an impenetrable wall if you don’t shoot him down quickly enough, and if a scooter rider is too close to the entrance he can quickly press you into a corner as the other enemies close in even if you immediately started opening fire on him to weaken him. You can leave a room the moment you purchased the important item, but staying to stop the other shoppers rewards you with precious cash, and this game is essentially a score challenge. In a room where the enemies and barriers aren’t poorly placed though, the game can be tolerable if a bit unexciting in that your approaches are often grabbing a shopper’s attention and then firing ketchup robotically until they’re down, so even when things are working, they can get repetitive due to a lack of fair shake-ups to the game design.

The upgrades could have made things much more interesting, but the paltry amount on offer do very little to help. There’s an upgrade to your dash maneuver, an ability with very little use in the cramped rooms where speed won’t help you overcome the cases of poor placement, but the ketchup upgrades are actually fairly good and worth saving towards. Increasing how many shots a single squirt produces is basically your form of a damage upgrade, the weaker grandmas and scooter riders going down much faster once you acquire them. Its triple shot upgrade also offers a spread good for clearing crowds, but having a fully upgraded ketchup bottle invalidates almost all of the game’s difficulty, leading to those more repetitive rooms where the only way you’re going to get hurt is having a room that unfairly places foes too close to start. The cash register shop is also the only way to regain lost health though, and this design choice is actually a fairly good one. Having to wait to refill your life bar makes things a bit more tense, and the fact it costs your precious cash also means you might have to choose between the bottle upgrades or topping off your health. Early game difficulty really isn’t too bad though, making it easy to just wait and get the ketchup expansions before having to recoup any lost health, but had Black Friday: The Game put up a good fight instead of teetering between mindlessly easy and abrupt unfair enemy placement, the need to balance buying upgrades and health could have worked well. It doesn’t help you have so few choices for upgrades either. You can get enough cash to get all the upgrades early on and then just have to manage your health, and since the game plateaus when it comes to new content so quickly, ending your run can eventually just come down to wanting to be done playing a game that rapidly wears out its welcome.

THE VERDICT: Black Friday: The Game not only fails to capture any of the exaggerated shopping fervor surrounding the day after Thanksgiving, but it can’t even deliver on its top down Rogue-like design well. The upgrade system is bare bone and mostly just equates to damage increases that serve to speed up the slow fights, enemies relying mostly on badly randomized room layouts to have a chance of damaging the player. So long as luck doesn’t screw you over, Black Friday: The Game quickly becomes rote, the imbalanced difficulty never finding a sweet spot since the game is far too simplistic to enjoy once you understand what little it has to offer.

And so, I give Black Friday: The Game for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. Black Friday: The Game feels incomplete. The upgrade menu looks like it can contain more options but it only contains a small selection that barely asks the player to make meaningful choices. The balance between healing and power growth could have been interesting, but at most, you might want to heal up instead of getting the ketchup bottle upgrades that transition the game from slow and repetitive to just simply repetitive. The enemy types really don’t gel well with the random room layouts though. The boxed in battle areas getting populated with random clutter and baddies can make entering one lead to guaranteed damage rather than having the rival shoppers pose a legitimate threat through interesting attack methods or group tactics. Some do have potential, the obese scooter rider’s concept of pushing you into other attacks a smart one that is undermined by the fact he mostly just appears where he can be taken out before he’s trouble or where he’s too close and can cram you into badly placed level geometry.

Black Friday: The Game is at its best when you’re just squirting ketchup at grannies from afar, and even then it’s just humdrum action instead of an engaging give-and-take. Once the small amount of enemy diversity increases, you’re either strong enough to handle any layout save for unlucky ones or still so weak it takes ages to repel the new threats. Some tweaking to the difficulty or more interesting variables to latch onto could salvage Black Friday: The Game somewhat, but its incredibly bland gameplay loop and shallowness make it a game that no one should be rushing to buy, not even at a steep discount.