Brotato is a small spud-based wave-survival rogue-lite made by Swiss indie game developer Thomas Gervraud, aka Blobfish [www.blobfish.dev]

• Combat is extremely satisfying. ¹
  
  
• The sound effects and feedback to the player are excellent, especially for an indie game. ²
  
  
• Design makes it extremely replayable, with lots of grindable achievements.
  
  
• Consistent, pretty art style. ²
  
  
• Extremely polished and balanced, despite the many items. ³
  
  
• Great value for the USD $4.99 non-sale price.
  
  
• Amazing modding community with great workshop support. ⁴
  
  
• Game difficulty scales well, so your stat choices matter. ⁵

• The achievements are too easy. ⁶
  
  
• Clicking anywhere during the game's loading process will cause your game window to glitch.
  
  
• With the exception of record-chasing, endless mode is mostly pointless.
  
  
• Not as much content for achievements as one might want; I'd suggest adding more planets as DLC.

¹ The game's combat is perfectly set up, not only with satisfying sounds and clear hits, the watery noise of picking up materials, and the level-up sound reminiscent of an arcade, but also with very tight hit-boxes so you never feel cheated when trying to dodge an enemy attack, as well as your stats and choices throughout the run influencing what style of combat you will be enduring, from a Gungeon-like bullet-hell, weaving yourself through waves of enemy projectiles, to a relaxing ranged run, as you sit in the center of the map with Sifd's Relic collecting all materials for you, sniping every enemy before they even have a glimpse of a chance of attacking you. Though the default for this game is as an autoshooter, there are circumstances in which you'd want to aim, which they have an option to enable in the settings.

² The art style is incredibly consistent and beautiful, even with UI elements, meshing perfectly alongside the sound design, and the satisfying idle animations all come together for a very polished-feeling experience.

³ With 55 weapons split across 15 classes, along with 177 unique items and 44 characters, there's a lot to consider while doing your run. The developer still managed to keep great balance in all of this, and even with stats interacting with every one of these things differently, you still have to consider what you're grabbing. The game also manages something that I see even some AAA games miss out on: input choices. You can use the mouse to navigate menus or either the Arrow Keys or WASD, which you can also use in-game to control your character. You can choose to manually aim or let it auto-aim by default. I find the controls very intuitive, even if I need to switch hands to grab my drink while dodging alien attacks.

⁴ The game has an amazing modding community, with mods ranging from thousands of new characters to ridiculous, game-breaking weapons and new weapon classes, all with direct support from the developer and Steam Workshop functionality.

⁵ The varied characters and stat combos force you to understand the different weapons and stats and use them appropriately with each other, scaling well with difficulty.

⁶ A significant portion of the achievements are for simply beating a run as a character, which can be done on Danger 0 (the equivalent of a very easy difficulty), making those achievements repetitive and at times unchallenging. I'd have loved it if they were for Danger 5, and maybe more for beating all characters at each difficulty.

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I'd highly recommend this game. At it's price point of only $4.99 at the time of review, you can easily get 18 hours just getting the character achievements, putting a price per hour at only ~28¢; that's excluding all danger-based and passively obtainable achievements. This is also a great choice for those of you who work or have children, due to the short run times and ability to quit a run midway and resume whenever you next have time.