Brotato (2023)

Playtime: 1 hour (i got to wave 18-20)

Review

Brotato is an Asteroidslike, much more so than Vampire Survivors. You walk around a tiny area, tons of enemies spawn and you fight them with automatically firing weapons that you can optionally manually aim. After each wave you can buy more weapons and various upgrades, and sometimes you get them for free.

Brotato is a very simple game. Unlike Vampire Survivors it doesn't have a predictable levelling system, expansive levels or tons of enemy variety. On the other hand, it does have more varied characters and allows for player aiming. Its biggest weakness and perhaps strength is the sizable amount of different weapons and upgrades. Even with re-rolls there's a lot of luck involved in getting good stuff. Other than that my main gripe is how cramped the levels are. VS has slower enemies and a ton of space, allowing you to at least sort of play tactically. In Brotato you just run around hoping enemies don't spawn on top of you. It's mildly amusing but i quickly grew bored with it.

Played on my Steam Deck.

Overall really entertaining and addictive simple game that keeps you coming back. It's pretty shallow in terms of music, graphics, etc... but that is part of the charm. It does get stale pretty quick, much more quickly than other games in this genre, which knocks it down a but. Overall though, I had a good time and will probably come back to it.

Roll Credits?: N/A

Surprised/Let Down/As Expected: As Expected

Favorite Mechanic or Narrative Moment: Some builds really feel like you can break the game in half, and managing your economy is a fun twist compared to a lot of the vampire survivor-likes that just have you purchasing upgrades at set intervals. In a similar vein, I enjoyed the wave style combat change since it lets you make builds that focus on survival instead of having to just kill as many things as possible to keep leveling.

Least Favorite Thing: A lot of the different characters feel a little shoehorned into what they have to build to succeed, which limits replayability in some extent because every time you play X character you have to pursue Y build. This isn't true for all characters, but the game doesn't quite have the depth of other roguelikes to make me want to keep playing it for years to come. It also doesn't have as robust of an unlock system as some of the others that makes me want to try and unlock more things constantly.

I got Brotato in a bundle a little while back and finally decided to give it a go for myself. It's a decent little vampire survivor style game with de-emphasized metaprogression, set in a smaller arena with a more explicit wave-based structure.

Brotato controls well and has great basic mechanics. Unfortunately, it's a bit same-y from run to run, which isn't a great trait for this sort of game. I found it a bit easy as well. I only lost a couple of times on my way to a win on the highest difficulty, but I've watched Retromation play here and there over the last year, so I had a good idea of the general strategies going in. I'm marking it as finished for now, but I could see myself coming back to try out a new build from time to time.

Steam Curator

Brotato's de-emphasis on meta progression layers make it more of a traditional roguelike than many of its 'Survivor' contemporaries.

The upside to each run being mostly in a vacuum is that they're fun enough to get away with it. Slick combat, tons of build diversity, and high replayability make this a great game to leave perpetually installed.

Sometimes the best long term hook is just being a really good video game.