Sporting Goods Shop: Prologue Review (PC)

Heads up, Liquor Store Simulator — we’re liquidating the excess casks of whiskey and wine, and replacing the barrel with dumbbells and yoga mats, goggles and head guards for an all-new business endeavor. That’s right, alcohol is out, and fitness is in. The store won’t look any different, but the products that we ship will be drastically different than those that featured on the rail before. The job, eh — it won’t change. As before, you will purchase stock, stack shelves, and serve the customers in an effort to earn more cash to fund other avenues of business. And if you didn’t join us when we operated as a liquor store, then don’t sweat it — you can transfer your experience from one of, well, hundreds of other business simulation games. Tomorrow, we launch Sporting Goods Shop. Next week, it’ll probably be something else entirely.

In case you haven’t heard, Sporting Goods Shop is, without a doubt, a small cog in the same rolling mechanism that powers just about every business simulation game that has launched in the past, I don’t know, fifteen years, give or take. Its title is different, but the game itself falls beneath the same umbrella that houses hundreds, if not thousands of textbook IPs. In other words, it’s Liquor Store Simulator, but with fewer chemicals and more protein. If you cut the products out of the equation, though, what you have here is a bog-standard chore core simulator—a game that centers its entire world around the formulaic process of labeling, shipping, and upgrading the rustic roots of a soon-to-be bubbling business.

Same Thing, Different Day

As much as I’d like to say that Sporting Goods Shop is in a league of its own, I just can’t bring myself to tell such a lie. The bitter truth here is that, while it does make an effort to provide its own branding, the actual wrapper that encases it is as familiar as one might imagine it to be. But that isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, or even that it’s incapable of sharing the same spotlight as its competitors. On the contrary, Sporting Goods Shop has a great range of display-worthy items and accessible components, with the simple addition of various sporting equipment, business upgrades, and bite-sized mini-games merely acting as the icing on the cake, so to speak.

I can’t say that Sporting Goods Shop is bursting at the rim with eccentric fixtures or things that revolutionize the tycoon genre, but I can say that, even with the lack of originality in its design, the actual process of both building and maintaining a store is a lot of fun here. Well, I say fun as if to suggest that each portion of the game is brimming with twists and turns, when really it’s the sense of accomplishment that comes with surpassing certain business milestones that exhumes joy from your soul in this department. Alas, the bulk of the gameplay is just as dull as it is in alternate realities—stack the shelves, serve the customers, and make slow but oddly meaningful upgrades to the basic infrastructure of the enterprise. That’s all there, and so, if you fancied something a little out of the ordinary — tough luck, basically.

Sports Today, Boba Tomorrow

The good news here is that Sporting Goods Shop does offer a co-op mode alongside its primary single-player option, which allows up to four friends to join you on your quest to overthrow the fitness regime and monopolize the trade. With this comes another issue, though: the more players that you have to assist your duties, the more challenging the experience becomes, with customers demanding more of your services, and refraining from forking out the asking prices on your products. And that brings us to one of the main trials in the game: setting prices to outmaneuver the market and elevate your net profits. Granted, it isn’t taxing work to say the least, though the game does cough up various financial choices for you to juggle throughout your ascension process. Nothing an avid business tycoon player wouldn’t be able to crack, mind you.

To state the obvious, the Prologue only paints a small picture of the world that the upcoming release will bring to the surface in due course. With that in mind, there are several things that we can’t quite wrap our fingers around just yet—the complete portfolio of licensing deals, sellable assets, or business upgrades, for instance. Moreover, the current version of the game doesn’t come pre-packaged with the usual hot fixes and post-launch elbow grease, meaning, there are several audiovisual issues that have yet to be resolved. It isn’t unplayable, however, for the sake of covering all bases, it is worth mentioning that there are some minor technical drawbacks, though nothing gamebreaking, thankfully.

Verdict

Sporting Goods Shop: Prologue jots down the same notes as its peers, all in the hopes of repeating the same formulaic tycoon experience as the previous scoop of games that have come before it. And it captures said formula surprisingly well, with a great deal of familiar assets and easy-to-digest mechanics that are intentionally designed to extract that ironclad muscle memory rooted deep inside your head.

Of course, Sporting Goods Shop is as predictable as ever, with roughly ninety percent of the endgame content still remaining openly transparent even in the debut chapter, or the Prologue, in this case. That said, even with the veil between the current version and the full-fledged release being next to nonexistent, there are still several areas of interest that I’m oddly looking forward to, including the full implementation of the in-game contracts and licensing deals. Presumably, the gameplay won’t change all that much, but for what it’s worth, even after beating the Prologue, it seems as if there’s still plenty of room for additional material here.

If you like business simulation games that don’t steer too far from the beaten path, then you should feel right at home re-enacting that same tycoon role out here on the court with Sporting Goods Shop.