Folks, I apologize for all these delays with new updates. I finished playing the Brotato: Abyssal Terrors DLC for this review before I went to the hospital, but I am still on the mend and find myself returning to bed for long naps with just a few chores around the house. Did I need to ride my bike into town for supplies? Well then, it’s time for a two hour nap. Pulled some weeds in the yard? Three hour nap. This isn’t likely to improve soon, but I’ll do my best to get back on track with reviews.
So, before I talk about the Brotato DLC, I should mention that I had little interest in getting it until I noticed that the achievements progress bar in Epic Game Store’s library page wasn’t full even though I’d unlocked everything. This by itself annoys me. I can’t say if it’s a problem with Epic’s platform only, or if it was a choice of the game maker’s and is the same on Steam, but either way, I should not be penalized for not buying the DLC.
Adding into this is the percent of players who completed the achievements, but I’ll get into that later. (And this will be a recurring theme in my next review as well.) But setting that aside, I decided to get the DLC because some of the challenges sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try them.
Oh, and in my original review, I said that the story was the Brotatoes were killing waves of “aliens.” But in adding a new map with the DLC, it became clear that the Bros had invaded another planet, which put a whole other light on the game. The Brotatoes are the invading aliens killing increasingly angrier wave of natives, which seems more reasonable from this adjusted angle. I mean, I’m okay with playing as the asshole in any game. I just kind of assumed we were acting as the lone remaining defender, not the first colonizer. That’s my bad.
The new map is…it’s fine, and it features new enemies native to their surroundings. But honestly, I played it a few times before going back to the original map. Many of the challenges for the DLC were made harder by playing on the new map, and the added enemy variety wasn’t that compelling for me to keep grinding on it.
There is a new mechanic added to the game, Curse, which creates an interesting risk and reward balance. Adding to Curse, either by killing cursed enemies (Highlighted in a purple outline) or by picking up cursed weapons in the shop, increases the health, strength, and speed of cursed enemies, but it also increases the number of materials they will drop. Cursed weapons in the shop are stronger than normal versions, and they may also have added special traits. So aside from the challenge to finish a run with no Curse added, I almost always went in for adding more Cursed equipment to every run.
On that note, finishing a run with no Curse ended up being really damned hard. Any ranged weapon could randomly hit a cursed enemy who was off-screen, and even with melee weapons, I could accidentally hit one who had just popped up next to my Brotato. In the end, I had to select items that severely downgraded my range so that I could only hit enemies directly next to the Bro, and as you can imagine that made just surviving the run EXTREMELY difficult.
Just as with the base game, victory for any challenge boiled down to whether the RNG was willing to give me a workable build. Some runs only took a few attempts, and I won by actually killing the final boss instead of running down the timer and winning simply by not dying.
A lot of the new Bros have fun new abilities that I needed time to sort how best to use, and also what builds would help them arrive to the final wave with plenty of firepower to spare. I actually had more fun with these new characters than I did with the base game, even as I struggled against the RNG to get the right builds.
Having said that, I don’t think the makers understand what percents are. Lots of upgrades say they add five percent to a stat like armor or damage, but it’s not a percent. It’s just five more points added to the current value. That’s not how percentages work.
In a similar vein, the achievements of the DLC say “0.2% of players completed this.” But that’s not really the case. This is taking all players of the game into account, including those who don’t own the DLC. Now keep in mind, Epic gave Brotato away for free. A lot of the base game achievements have very low percentages, but I’m sure that’s because many folks bounced off of the grind or the difficulty without attempting many of the challenges. Even so, the percentage of players beating the challenges in the DLC should be limited to those who bought it, which would create a more accurate percentage.
What I’m getting at is, I’m not that great of a gamer. I’m certainly not in the ranking of best gamers ever. If these numbers were adjusted to account only for players who bought the DLC, I believe they more accurately say something like “40% of players completed this.” Because honestly, while some were hard to finish, they weren’t so difficult that a mediocre gamer like me couldn’t brute force my way to victory.
In the end, I find myself just as conflicted about recommending the DLC as I was about the base game. It doesn’t help that after installing the DLC, the game became a lot more prone to crashes. I would pause it to go outside with the dogs, come back and try to play only to have it crash to the desktop. The current run does continue from the last shop visit, so I never lost that much progress, but a crash is still a crash, right?
Did I enjoy my time with both the DLC and base game? Well, yes, but I was equally vexed by all the runs that ended in dismal failure simply because RNGesus wasn’t feeling generous that day. And by day, I mean certain challenges eluded me for the whole day before I finally lucked into a working build. I’m semi-retired, so I have time to put up with this kind of bullshit. But most folks I know have jobs and families and lives to keep them busy, so I think this kind of game will just annoy them.
Maybe I’m wrong, and some of you are just masochistic enough to grind against this mind boggling mess. If so, for you, I’m saying it’s a 4 star experience. Much like the base game, Brotato: Abyssal Terrors can be a lot of fun when it hits those Goldilocks moments, and for the very patient gamers, there can be quite a few of them. Just go into it knowing that there are often some WIDE gaps between those moments.