Barbecue With Friends (PC)

I’ve heard some strange stories in my time. The one that I haven’t heard so much about, and rightly so, is the one about the Lucha libre wrestler sharing burgers and flipping cured meats at a local family barbecue. That’s a new one, and one that I can’t quite imagine being meaty enough to translate into something more interactive. Alas, Barbecue With Friends is a video game—a short-sighted, almost lackluster game, at that. But it is a game nonetheless, and so, odd concept aside, I feel that it’s only fair that I bite my tongue and digest it in a professional manner — whatever that means.

Barbecue With Friends brings just about everything that you might imagine a game of such a transparent title would bring to the picnic table. By that, I mean that it contains everything that centers around the art of barbecuing on a warm summer afternoon: burgers, hot dogs, beers, and good times with friends. And if you’re struggling to figure out how such things work in a video game setting, then join the club — we’ve got spatulas and brioche rolls.

The good news is, Barbecue With Friends does feature something of a playable experience with hands-on mechanics. Granted, it isn’t quite as in-depth as your traditional cooking simulator, but the source material is still there. And by that, I mean that you have the opportunity to prepare meats, marinate them in one of several sauces, and serve the (hopefully) delicious end product to your friends before soaking up the general atmosphere of a backyard cookout. Oh, and did I mention that you can also kick your buds up the backside and skewer them like a shish kebab? Put that on your grill and smoke it.

Cooking for Two

Barbecue With Friends does one thing in particular that other culinary-centric sims fail to do, which is generate wholesome(ish) entertainment without being overly ambitious or painfully complex. Here, you won’t find any pompous folk, nor will you unearth a hidden menu from a reputable Michelin star chef, for that matter. No, Barbecue With Friends takes it back a couple of notches, with the bread and butter of the cooking experience consisting mostly of basic ingredients and textbook methods. It’s BBQ, though, so it wouldn’t have taken a genius to connect those dots, let’s be fair. To say that anyone could do it would be a bit unfair to the natural keepers of the grill. But, to be blunt — anyone could do it. And it seems that Barbecue With Friends’ only goal is to openly illustrate that fact. Fair enough.

There isn’t really a storyline to chew through here, other than, perhaps, the one that you craft with the friends who bulk out your backyard. Due to it being a multiplayer game at heart, the game itself does indeed rely on your creativity to build the memories, so to speak. In other words, you can’t just waltz into the cookout and expect incredible things to happen. Here, the barbecue is exactly what you make of it, and it does all in its power to coerce you into doing things your way, and not by following set rules and other in-game guidelines. The point is, you must bridge the gaps between the lull of the cooking process and the camaraderie that comes with hanging out with your guests. And if they don’t make an effort to spice up the conversation, then hey — at least you can kick them.

It’s Raw!

I can’t complain about the antics, but I can complain about several other things that bog down an otherwise weirdly enjoyable barbecuing experience. It’s all well and good that you can skewer your friends for the sake of it and amount to the title of a drunken sailor, but when all’s said and done, no amount of skewering can remove the fact that the rest of the game still has a lot of bugs left in it. Perhaps these technical issues will be ironed out in future patches, I’m not sure. Still, it’s worth noting that both the visual and mechanical aspects aren’t entirely up to scratch here, and they do, unfortunately, often cause problems. That said, as it’s a game that solely relies on its own silliness, it isn’t always clear as to what’s intentional, and what’s actually broken and somewhat half-baked.

The controls are, well — they’re passable, though a far cry from perfect. There’s a bit of an uphill struggle as far as all of that goes, which means that, even with such a simple recipe at hand, making the food isn’t always a smooth process. The graphics, too, aren’t what you would call “picture perfect,” much less deserving of any special recognition, for that matter. But again, Barbecue With Friends isn’t perfect, nor does it aim to be anything of the sort. It’s raw. But perhaps that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Verdict

Barbecue With Friends isn’t so much of a game-game as it is an excuse to flip virtual meats and slurp on fake beer for the sake of a good laugh. Like chowing down on the same burger for hours on end, though, there really is only so much that you can digest here before things eventually become a little stale. After so much time at the grill, the conversation fizzles out to mindless jargon, and before long, nobody wants to flip the meat or exchange dogs. But that’s part of the process, I suppose: enjoying the moment, and knowing all too well that it won’t last forever. The question is, is a brief moment really worth a few bucks? Eh — yes and no.

If you can overlook the fact that Barbecue With Friends has little to no special effects or anything remotely spectacular about it, and that it’s almost too minimalistic for the average indie multiplayer game, then you might be able to scrape just enough joy out of it. I’ll admit, it will never beat the actual process of flipping patties and engaging in small talk with your neighbors, but it will, however, remind you of the simpler things in life, and how we as people should continue to cherish them. Perhaps it’s not as deep as that. Perhaps there isn’t a moral to it at all. Still, for a game that is literally based around everyone’s favorite pastime, I think we can all agree that barbecuing, be it in person or online, is worth every cent. Right?