Bro. Bruh! This game…if I were inclined to review games based only on the first day of play-time, Brotato would have not only been a 5 star winner, it would have been on my games of the year list. A lot of this comes down to its similarities to Vampire Survivors, but also to sharing some features of The Binding of Isaac.
Let’s get the story out of the way first. You play a potato who is killing waves of purple aliens. Yep, that’s it. If I make that sound bad, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s good to play a game where the whole premise can be summed up in a sentence, and all the real intricacies comes from learning to master its core mechanics.
In this case, the core mechanic is simplicity defined. You don’t have to push any buttons to attack, because that’s done automatically. All you have to do is learn to move, either to dodge attacks or move in just close enough to deal some damage of your own.
Most of the potatoes can carry six weapons, but one bro can only carry one, another can’t carry any, and another can carry up to twelve, but they start getting penalties added the more weapons that they have. All the potatoes have different stats, and with most, it’s a mixed bag of useful buffs married with one or more debilitating handicaps. For instance one potato can only use primitive weapons like sticks and rocks, and they can only upgrade their gear to tier II. This is why every character can be a huge pain until they finally get the right stats to make them shine.
There are twenty waves to fight through for every run, and as you might expect, each wave adds more aliens, many of them who start shooting back. As you play and pass challenges, you can unlock other potatoes with different abilities, and after beating the game’s twentieth wave of aliens on Danger level 0, you unlock Danger 1. Beating each harder level of difficulty leads eventually to Danger 5.
Folks, it was both Danger 5 and the last two challenges that stripped the shine off of this game like a sand blaster on a new paint job. Let me start with Danger 5. After banging my head on it for almost a full day, I went online to see if anyone could suggest the best character to win with. Almost all advice suggested that instead of fighting the two bosses, it was best to just run out the timer. So I tried that for another two days with absolutely no change in my progress. I finally won using a character who gains a massive damage boost by upgrading their six weapons to the highest tier, killing both bosses like…well, like a boss. After that, I dropped the game back to Danger 0 for what I thought would be two easy-peasy cakewalks.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahaaa-aaaah. But no.
See, the last two goals were leaving ten trees alive on a single wave and holding onto 3,000 materials. Both are tied directly to the same problem I ran into with Danger 5, RNGesus being a finicky and fickle bastard.
Let me back up to my failing runs of Danger 5 to explain how the random rolls made so many runs painful. To win at that level of difficulty, I needed a specific set of attributes. There are status upgrades, stuff like damage, melee damage, ranged damage, and elemental damage. Most weapons will use one type, but others can use two, something like ranged and elemental, or melee and ranged. Then there’s stuff like attack speed, HP regeneration, life steal (which doesn’t work at all unless the weapon has a life steal status, something I didn’t figure out for a few hours), dodge, and armor.
Ideally, for King Potato, I needed all six swords to be fully upgraded to tier IV, and I needed stat increases for melee damage, HP regeneration, attack speed, dodge, and armor. Anything less than a score over twenty-five in all fields led to dismal failure long before reaching wave 20. In fact, I usually wiped out around wave 16 with rage inducing regularity. This is because I couldn’t get the stats I needed, nor the equipment.
It is possible to re-roll stats and items in the shop between waves, but each time I do it, the price to re-roll goes up again, and I might blow through 1,000 materials and still not find the thing I needed. I even had a run where I got to wave 11 and still only had two swords, and I couldn’t upgrade them either. Other runs failed because I didn’t have enough armor, or enough HP regeneration, or my attack speed was too slow, so the hundreds of aliens on-screen pushed my potato into a corner and started dancing the mashed potato.
So obviously, it isn’t hard to see why holding 3,000 materials was hard, but I’d unlocked a potato named Jack who got bonus materials. I was sure it would be easy, except there are fewer aliens on Jack’s runs.
While playing this same challenge over and over with every character, I started to notice that no matter who I played with, I always got damn near the same amount of materials. Every. Single. Time. That was when I realized I had to pick Old Potato because the size of his arena is smaller, and then aim to buy all slingshots without paying to upgrade them. By not needing to buy anything, and also taking advantage of the weapon’s ricochet to take out more aliens, I got the challenge done by wave 12, where every other run before left me around three hundred materials short at the end of wave 20. Even if I won the level, I’d lost the challenge.
The last one, keeping trees alive, I again thought I knew which character to go with, Lumberjack. But instead it was beaten with the One-Armed potato, so named because he can only use one weapon. What was ruining my runs with Lumberjack is his ability to chop down trees with one hit, which actually made the challenge harder with him.
Here again, I needed a day to get a winning run, but this one was lost hunting for a very specific item: making more trees grow per wave. I’d rightly guessed that I needed three of these to get the goal, but RNGesus was not feeling generous. Again, I had so many runs that I won, but I still lost.
It was during the MANY days of running the last two challenges that I also nailed down the other nitpick that was bothering me. Every upgrade is made useless, even playing at Danger 0. There’s a challenge to collect 50 speed upgrades, yes? But even after doing it, the aliens can still run down the potatoes because they’re getting speed upgrades too, and theirs are better than mine. Going all in on armor? Doesn’t matter. The aliens get a damage boost so you might as well not bother unless you’re already maxed out HP regeneration and dodge. Dumping all upgrades into damage and the specific damage type for any weapon yields meager gains in on-screen damage numbers because the aliens are bulking up their health,
What I’m saying is, the game isn’t hard because of the hordes being overwhelming. It’s hard because under the hood, the game is making sure you never feel like you’re making progress. It makes me think of games like Dark Souls, and how at first, even the littlest minions could wreck my character. But then I would upgrade my sword and strength, maybe get some better armor and add some health, and now those first mobs just wilt under my attacks.
But getting to wave 10 and beyond, even the littlest aliens of Brotato also have more health to counteract all damage upgrades, and they hit harder to ignore upgrades to health and armor. It doesn’t feel good to play, except in smaller doses, and even then, only if the RNG will let me make a build that doesn’t suck.
I will add that the shop does something nice that most rogue-like games do not. If I see an item or weapon I need, but I can’t afford it, I can toggle a lock below them, and the shop will hold onto them until I buy them or toggle the lock off. There’s no more finding just what I needed, only to lament because I’m two coins shy of the price.
Before I get to the score, I just want to say, this is probably the hardest game I’ve played all year, and it damn near broke me. Part of it is because there seems to be characters who are perfect for certain challenges, and they’re actually counteractive. But the larger part is needing the perfect build to make the challenges possible, and there are many, many, MANY times when they won’t come together no matter how much I re-roll and waste resources.
I really struggled on how to score this because of those last few challenges, but I also remember that up to Danger 4, I was telling the hubby it was a fun game, even if it was hard. So using that as my standard, I’ll give Brotato 4 stars. Even so, I will only recommend it to folks who have the patience to keep smashing their heads and hands against a seemingly impossible challenge, or the stubbornness to push through it because they wanted to have a final review ready for this year. (That would be me, although this isn’t the last review thanks to a small flood of cheap indie games that all took less time to play.)
But if you are the kind of gamer up to the challenge, this could be a great way to…vegetate? Yeah, I’ll see myself out.