One of the most versatile foods on the planet is the simple potato. Much like noodles or rice, they go with just about anything and can be prepared in as many ways as the person making them can imagine. As it turns out potatoes are also every bit as versatile at eradicating aliens, which is something of a surprise coming from a simple tuber but it’s hard to argue with results. Brotato has been burning up Steam’s Early Access for the past ten months as one of the more popular takes on the Vampire Survivors formula, and while “complete” is a relative term the game evolved into its 1.0 form today.
Brotato and Vampire Survivors share a lot of similarities in being pure action games about getting ridiculously powerful in order to survive hordes of monsters attacking in numbers large enough to overwhelm the player’s firepower, but other than being in the same genre they’re very different games under the hood. Each standard run is a series of twenty levels, each a few seconds longer than the last, and when the timer runs down there’s a power-up break. Any crates found during the level award their items with the choice to collect or recycle for material, which is Brotato’s currency. Gaining levels lets you choose one of four options to upgrade a body part, each of which has its own individual stat bonus like defense, attack speed, luck, etc. Finally, the shop pops up with four options available for purchase, a semi-random selection of weapons and items each with their own bonuses and effects.
It’s as fun as always to run around an arena swarming with aliens and dismantling the ever-growing horde, but to do that successfully in Brotato you’ll really need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen character and create a build that works well with them. The Brawler, for example, has a -50 modifier to its ranged attack, so there’s really no point in going for guns, while the Ranger can’t equip melee weapons at all. Each character can wield up to six weapons at once, except for One Armed who can only equip one (with a 200% attack speed and 100% damage bonus) and Multitasker, who can equip twelve weapons but gets a 5% attack debuff for each one. There are dozens of characters to unlock, and while you’re able to certainly beat the whole game with all of them it takes a good amount of thought and a bit of luck to design a build that complements their skills, especially with the huge number of items with a dizzying array of pros and cons.
Brotato released on Steam today but still has a future of unspecified updates ahead. In the meantime there’s also a Switch version in the works with no release date quite yet, and if we’re lucky it may (maybe!) end up on PS4/5 and the Xbox consoles as well. The release trailer below only shows the action rather than the number-crunching half of the game involved in making good choices about creating a workable build, but that’s hard to make look exciting so it makes a kind of sense. Whether you want to design the perfect potato-warrior or just throw whatever powers catch your fancy at it to see how things work out, Brotato’s vicious alien horde has been fully released to put it to the test.
