Introduction to Black Friday
Black Friday is a casino slot from Shady Lady, inviting you to another spectacle of absurd humor wrapped in creepy, caricatural design. The studio has already given us a taste of its uncompromising attitude toward human weaknesses in games like Swoll, showcasing extreme vanity, or Office Party, which ridiculed the corporate stereotypes. This time, the crosshairs of mockery have landed on consumers charging through the stores' alleys to score a bargain of a lifetime when the world enters the most intense shopping spree starting from the last Friday of November.
You've probably seen bizarre videos circulating on the internet where people trample themselves, trying to reach the discounted products first and grab as many as they can. Products they probably don't even truly need. The game mirrors that behavior in features like Road Rage Re-Spins and Parking Lot Stampede during the primary stage, to then put you in the role of a guardian of inventory during the bonus round, where you'll have to eliminate as many customers as possible while using various weapons to score cash prizes. Beware of the mighty Karen, who can bring the most impressive rewards, but is also the most difficult to tackle! If you manage to fall enough clients, ideally including that mighty beast, the shop's management may grace you with a bonus reaching 20,000x the bet.
If you feel like you're not yet up to the challenge and prefer to prepare yourself for the inevitable chaos, try out the demo mode to test the features without any risk.
Theme, Gameplay & Payouts
Black Friday is a video slot from Shady Lady with 5 reels, 4 rows, and 30 paylines. You can choose your stake from a range of options, starting from a Min.bet of 0.1 up to a Max.bet of 50. The game offers a default RTP of 96.35%, meaning you can expect stable average long-term returns; however, make sure to check your version before playing, as two alternative variants of 94.04% and 91.92% are also released. The math model combines high volatility, prioritizing the value of wins before their frequency, with a max win capped at 20,000x the bet. You'll be able to trigger the bonus round at the rate of 1 in 294 spins, while the base game frequency comes with a stingy 10.99%.
Like in many previous games from the studio, the theme carries a coarse, creepy vibe, emphasizing the flaws of the subject matter to the maximum. A messy parking lot filled with banged-up trucks and shopping carts discarded sloppily around will be the main scene, where the atrocities will occur. To soften the blow, the artwork carries a cartoony style and comes with an entertaining soundtrack peppered with announcements from the store's manager, as well as lines from other characters, making it slightly easier to digest the brutal reality and making the dark humor somewhat brighter. Four stereotypical representatives of the customer crowd do a particularly good job at portraying the craze of hunting the best bargains. Thanks to the game's optimized design, you can join them on any modern device, whether you prefer to play on a desktop, a smartphone, or a tablet.
The paytable holds two sets of regular symbols responsible for delivering payouts. All of them can be formed into winning paylines of between 3 and 5 matching instances on adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost one. Among the low-paying ones, there are a few regular shopping products, like a pack of toilet paper, a box of pastries, a handbasket filled with batteries, and a massaging device, awarding 2x the bet for a complete payline. The high-paying group includes images of four customers, represented by an old man on a scooter, a woman with a child, a redneck with a rifle, and a blue-haired woman with a pistol, which bring payouts ranging between 6x and 20x the bet for a 5-of-a-kind hit. Reels will also hold special symbols like Wilds in the form of a blood trail, three characters that trigger Road Rage Re-Spins, and Scatters appearing as the game's logo on a green screen.
Special Features & Slot Mechanics
What is the max win in the slot Black Friday?
You can win up to 20,000x the bet.
What features are available in the slot Black Friday?
The features are Road Rage Re-Spins, Parking Lot Stampede, Bonus & Super Bonus, Feature Buy, Highlight Reels, and Loot Boxes.
Road Rage Re-Spins
Three special characters, the Cop, the Protestor, and the Politician, can land on the grid among the regular symbols. Each of those figures has a corresponding vehicle: a Compact, a Pick-up, and a Techno Truck, respectively. The car will drive onto the reel on which the symbol appeared from the top and act as Wild. During the initial appearance, the shorter cars that don't cover the entire reel are complemented with a blood trail that's also Wild. Additionally, the Pick-up will carry a random fixed multiplier, while the Techno Truck will get a multiplier that increases by 1 with every nudge.
Next, re-spins are awarded, during which the cars nudge one position down per re-spin until they disappear from the grid. It's also possible to land more character symbols during re-spins to extend the sequence.
Parking Lot Stampede
This feature may trigger randomly on any base game spin and disable all low-paying symbols from the reels. You can also activate it simultaneously with the Road Rage Re-Spins.
Bonus & Super Bonus
Landing 3 Scatters anywhere on the grid during a base game spin activates the Bonus Game. The round doesn't come with a fixed number of spins, but continues until one of the character symbols descends beyond the bottom row. On each spin, new characters can be added on the top row, and all the ones present on the grid will move one position down. Each character carries a cash prize, which is won whenever they're eliminated from the board.
Elimination occurs thanks to three screens visible underneath the grid, which will display either an error (no modifier), a booster, or a weapon.
Screen 1 & 2 = may reveal boosters that multiply or increase the prize values on one or all characters. Alternatively, boosters can apply multipliers to weapons shown on Screen 3.
Screen 3 = may reveal a weapon. Each type affects the grid differently.
Pistol = eliminates a random character from the bottom row.
Machine Gun = eliminates all characters from the bottom row.
Laser = eliminates all characters on a random reel.
Nuke = eliminates all characters on the grid.
If a weapon carries a multiplier, any characters' prizes it eliminates will be multiplied accordingly.
Before each spin, a brawl may kick off between the characters, making all of them fight until only one remains. The victorious figure absorbs the values of all defeated opponents. There's also a special character, Karen, which may randomly enter the grid, occupying two adjacent reels at the same time. She carries the most valuable prizes and always wins the brawls.
Super Bonus is triggered by landing 4 Scatters in the base game, and it's played with the same rules as the regular variant. However, in this mode, Screens will never produce an error.
Feature Buy
If you can't wait to start blasting the pesky customers from the grid, you can boost your base game spins and trigger certain features instantly from the Feature Buy menu, marked with a glowing orange dollar sign.
1.5x = Bonus Boost, increasing the chance to trigger the Bonus Game by 239%.
5x = Big Bonus Boost, increasing the chance to trigger the Bonus Game by 1,203%.
25x = guarantees triggering of the Road Rage Re-Spins feature.
85x = triggers the regular Bonus Game.
299x = triggers the Super Bonus Game.
129x = triggers the Bronze-tiered Bonus Game.
348x = triggers the Silver-tiered Bonus Game.
1,596x = triggers the Gold-tiered Bonus Game.
Bronze, Silver, and Gold Bonus Games are variants of the Regular Bonus with an enhanced average payout.
Highlight Reels
If you don't feel like watching every single round, you can skip the grind, trigger a large batch of spins instantly, and receive the result of 3 top results in the series.
87x = best 3 out of 100 spins.
221x = best 3 out of 300 spins.
333x = best 3 out of 500 spins.
Loot Boxes
Loot Boxes offer empowered versions of the bonus rounds with potentially higher payouts. Once you purchase one, a selection of cards will appear, out of which one choice can award a Bronze, Silver, or Gold bonus round. Additionally, each tier comes with 3 levels: 1, 2, or 3 stars, signifying its power. Enhanced bonuses play out identically to the regular ones but have an increased chance of providing a higher total win.
187x = Rare Loot Box
345x = Epic Loot Box (higher chance for Gold Bonus)
571x = Legendary Loot Box (highest chance for Gold Bonus)
Final Thoughts on Black Friday
Whether you've ever been part of the customer stampede or you prefer to steer clear of such bargain hunts, you probably know what Black Friday is about. Also, if you're in the latter crowd, you may feel more satisfaction while playing this comical representation of the consumer's top holiday, because you'll be the last line of defense against the crazed masses. Once again, Shady Lady has cleverly merged the satirical theme with the slot's mechanics, creating a consistent journey packed with entertaining stereotypes. All that dark humor is wrapped in a deliberately coarse audiovisual bundle, reflecting the mood of these bizarre events, where objects and their discounted prices are worth more than people. It fits together well, runs smoothly, and proves once more that the Lady knows what she's doing, regardless of what unique subject matter she decides to tackle, be it the terrifying horror of Sew or the fictional fantasy of Devil's Finger.
By now, we know that the studio takes a mixed approach toward mechanics, usually building on something familiar and adding unique twists to make the product stand out. Black Friday follows a similar formula, operating on vertical, stacked Wilds in the base game, which award re-spins as they nudge down the grid and, in the case of the most powerful variant, also increase their multiplier with every step, sort of mirroring Nolimit City's xNudge mechanism. Together with the vehicular massacre occurring on the grid, you may also occasionally hit the Parking Lot Stampede feature, leaving only the high-value characters on the grid, which arguably is the best way to source the most impressive wins in the base game. The bonus round came across as something along the lines of Mega Heist by Relax Gaming, with its symbols moving from one side of the grid to another while carrying cash prizes. Only here, instead of convicts reaching the sweet freedom, you're blasting away shoppers to grab the goodies they hold. But, as soon as one of them crosses the bottom line, you're done. Ah, and watch out for that Karen, as she's the greediest of all, packing her pockets with the most valuables, but also needing a more powerful arsenal to be taken down.
Black Friday mixes some familiar playstyles in both the base game and the bonus round, while exploiting the vain nature of the world's iconic consumer holiday.
