by 
Something, something “NOT TODAY”
Okay, so things have gotten a little ridiculous. I bought this game on a whim. A joke. The truth is, what I *actually* wanted was the game that was packaged *along* with this one, 20 Minutes to Dawn (which, side note, was a disappointment). This game was supposed to be a meme, a consolation a prize, a $2 laugh in the bargain bin that I rapidly consume and forget about just as quickly. I’m currently showing 98.6 hours played. Please. Send help.
Okay, okay, so about half of those hours are idle (I usually keep it running while I work for those times when I need a 5 minute break) but seriously. Brotato is a sleeper hit.
It’s your standard mobile auto-shooter, a genre that has seen popularization on mobile markets in recent years. While I’m usually critical of mobile games as a whole, I have to say that auto-shooters actually strike a strong compromising balance between simple controls (for the sake of the cell phone touch-screen) and actual mechanics. I’ve been playing and following the development of Magic Survival for quite a while now as it was the entry that sold me on the premise. Put differently, it’s a simple concept, but it works really well, and is open to a lot of fun mechanical interactions, in spite of the fact that your input is limited to just movement.
This brings us back to Brotato, one of the most recent in the genre. You start by choosing one of 44 different characters, each dynamically changing the way you have to play. Some have different starting weapons to choose from, others have high benefits and severe cons while others just drastically alter the game state, requiring a completely different mindset to approach. Load up on up to 6 different weapons (yes, 6, you have 6 hands… well, unless you play as One-Armed) that all have different effects and abilities. Do you stack similar kinds of weapons together to gain their characteristic effect? Do you diversify with the drawback of less specialization? Do you… just buy a bunch of cacti because it’s funny? (But hey, actually those cacti are no joke.)
Next come the items, which you’ll have to manage purchasing via the Materials (money) you’ll gain along the way. You really have to think hard about what you buy and when because it’s not as simple as “this does more damage,” or “high number goes brrr.” Almost every purchase comes with an upside but also a downside which requires you to intentionally offset the downsides, or just ignore them entirely and use them as an accepted-risk dump stat. This connects directly to one of the more unique mechanics the game introduces called “Harvesting.” It’s a simple thing–you gain money equal to your harvest value each round, and it increases by 5%. This creates runs where you might play risky early, investing a lot of your resources into harvesting for the big payoff later–only to lose it all when you die from lack of defense or damage. There’s even a character (Loud) that loses Harvesting each round, so if you’re not careful you’ll start bleeding finances.
Originally, I had assumed that it was a game attempting entirely to cash out on this meme. But it turns out that not even that is true–the developer has been in the business of making potato themed games since 2020. Err… and yes, you heard me. Potato themed. Spuds aside, I may have to try some of the others. All of this puts Brotato in an easy Tier 1 for me, as a game I keep coming back to in order to try new builds, characters and in general play a fun simple game with a lot of meaningful choices along the way.
