Brotato Review — A $5 Roguelike That Will Absolutely Consume Your Free Time

Close your eyes for a second and imagine this with me. Unless you’re driving, of course, in which case, please keep your eyes open because I am absolutely not responsible for what happens if you take my advice too literally. Now, imagine you’re a potato, surrounded by hordes of angry aliens who want nothing more than to beat the life out of you. What’s stopping them from turning you into mashed potatoes? Absolutely nothing, except for the fact that you can fight back with an absurd collection of weapons and increasingly ridiculous abilities. Welcome to Brotato, a game that takes a simple premise, throws a mountain of weapons and upgrades at it, and somehow turns the whole thing into one of the most addictive gaming experiences I’ve had in a long time.

I first heard about Brotato shortly after the pandemic, when people started talking about how much fun they were having with this strange little potato-themed shooter. The game was still in Early Access at the time, and I generally prefer to wait until a game reaches its full 1.0 release before investing serious time in it. I kept the game on my radar, watched it become increasingly popular, and eventually found myself years removed from those initial recommendations without ever having given it a proper shot. It was available cheaply on Steam, and it had even been on Xbox Game Pass for what felt like forever, yet I continued to pass it by while playing other games.

Once I finally decided to give it a chance, I discovered something that should probably have been obvious to me a long time ago: I am a roguelike sicko. I love the genre, and Brotato is another example of why. It takes the formula popularized by games like Vampire Survivors and builds its own identity around fast-paced arena combat, randomized upgrades, and a ridiculous number of ways to customize each run. There is no elaborate cinematic introduction, no sprawling world to explore, and no complicated narrative to get through before the fun begins. You choose your potato, pick your starting equipment, and immediately get to work making sure the surrounding aliens regret showing up to the wrong neighborhood.

What makes Brotato so enjoyable is that its simplicity isn’t a limitation; it’s the foundation of its success. Every system is built around getting you back into the action as quickly as possible, and the game understands that a great gameplay loop can be more compelling than an experience that tries to do everything at once. Before long, I was jumping into one run after another, experimenting with different characters, discovering new weapon combinations, and telling myself that I would stop after just one more attempt. You already know how that story ends. It doesn’t end after one more attempt.

Six Weapons, Forty-Four Potatoes, and an Absolutely Ridiculous Number of Builds

At its core, Brotato is a top-down arena shooter in which you play as a potato trying to survive increasingly dangerous waves of alien enemies. You can equip up to six weapons at a time, and once a run begins, those weapons generally attack automatically as enemies enter range. Your job is to move around the arena, avoid incoming damage, collect materials, and survive until the countdown timer runs out. The concept is easy enough to understand within a few minutes, but the layers of character customization and item combinations give the game an impressive amount of depth.

The character selection is where that depth really begins. As you progress, you unlock dozens of different potatoes, each with its own appearance, strengths, weaknesses, and mechanics that influence how you approach a run. Some characters encourage you to focus on ranged weapons, while others reward melee combat, elemental damage, critical hits, or unusual defensive strategies. Their starting attributes can influence your health, armor, harvesting, luck, damage output, and other statistics, meaning that choosing a character is more than just picking whichever little potato looks the funniest. You are committing to a particular style of play, and learning how to take advantage of that character’s strengths is a major part of the appeal.

Take the Wildling and the Lich, for example, both of which offer ways to build around recovering health and sustaining yourself during combat, albeit through different mechanics. These characters can appeal to players who enjoy aggressive strategies that reward them for staying in the fight rather than constantly running away from danger. Then there’s the Bull, which might be one of the most ridiculous character concepts in the entire game. The Bull cannot equip weapons, meaning you can’t simply load it up with six guns and mow down everything in sight. Instead, the character is designed around dealing damage when taking damage, turning the act of colliding with enemies into an offensive strategy. Build around survivability and the right supporting items, and you can turn this seemingly absurd potato into a walking explosion that punishes anything foolish enough to get close.

The Mage provides another example of how character selection can completely change a run, encouraging players to specialize in elemental damage such as fire, electricity, and freezing effects. A character that thrives with elemental effects might struggle when forced into a conventional weapon build, while another may become significantly more effective when focusing on melee damage or critical hits. These differences keep the game from feeling like a simple matter of choosing the character with the biggest numbers and repeating the same strategy until you win. Each potato asks you to consider a different combination of weapons, attributes, and items, and some of the most entertaining runs come from figuring out how to make an unusual character work.

That variety is what makes Brotato such an effective roguelike. You aren’t simply replaying the same scenario with a different character model; you’re constantly adjusting your approach to accommodate different mechanics. Some runs encourage you to build a defensive powerhouse that can survive getting surrounded, while others reward you for moving quickly and eliminating enemies before they become a serious threat. The possibilities can seem overwhelming when you first look at the available characters and upgrades, but the game introduces its systems in a way that makes experimentation feel natural. Every failed run becomes another opportunity to try a different combination, and every successful one makes you curious about what else you can unlock.

The Shop Is Where Runs Are Made or Broken

Surviving the waves is only half the battle, because Brotato gives you plenty of decisions to make between encounters. Each wave generally lasts somewhere between 20 and 90 seconds, depending on the stage and its circumstances, and enemies drop materials that can be collected for experience and spending in the shop. Once a wave ends, you can use those resources to purchase weapons, acquire items, and improve the statistics that will help you survive the next round. This creates a satisfying rhythm between the frantic action of the arena and the quieter process of deciding how to build your character.

The upgrades are where the game’s systems really start to interact with one another. You can improve attributes such as maximum health, armor, speed, luck, range, melee damage, ranged damage, and dodge chance, but the best choice depends on the character you’re playing and the direction your build is taking. A bonus that is extremely valuable in one run might be nearly useless in another, so you’re constantly weighing immediate benefits against the longer-term potential of your build. Sometimes you need more damage because enemies are overwhelming you; other times, investing in survivability is the only thing standing between you and a disastrous run.

The item selection is enormous, and the examples are delightfully ridiculous. Insanity increases your critical hit chance while reducing your damage, forcing you to decide whether the trade-off is worthwhile. Acid provides additional maximum health at the expense of some defensive statistics, while Adrenaline improves your dodge chance and offers a chance to recover health when avoiding an attack. Alien Eyes periodically fire projectiles around you, giving nearby enemies another reason to reconsider their career choices, while the Anvil can upgrade a weapon when you enter the shop. Baby Gecko, meanwhile, improves your range and increases the chance that materials will be attracted to you automatically.

Those are only a handful of examples from a much larger collection of items, and the fun comes from seeing how their effects combine. One upgrade might make you more durable, another might improve the effectiveness of your weapons, and a third might turn a weakness into something you can build around. The game constantly presents you with decisions that can meaningfully change the direction of a run, and even familiar characters can feel different depending on what the shop offers. I love that feeling of putting together a build that starts out modest and gradually becomes a ridiculous engine of destruction.

Weapon upgrades provide another reason to keep chasing better equipment. You have six weapon slots to fill, and duplicate weapons can be combined to create stronger versions of the same weapon type. That means you’re not just trying to collect six different ways to hurt aliens; you’re also looking for opportunities to consolidate and improve your arsenal as the difficulty increases. Do you keep a weapon because it complements your build, or do you replace it with something that has greater potential? Is it worth buying an item that improves your current setup, or should you save your materials for a better weapon in the next shop? These decisions may seem small in isolation, but they add up over the course of a run.

The best part is that the game rarely makes this process feel like work. The shop gives you enough information to make informed decisions without bogging down the pace, and the variety of items means that there is usually something worth considering. You will occasionally have to work with an awkward selection or make a purchase that doesn’t quite fit your ideal build, but those situations are part of the roguelike experience. You’re adapting to what the game gives you rather than following a rigid plan from beginning to end, and that unpredictability keeps each run interesting.

The Kind of Gameplay Loop That Eats Your Free Time

There is a reason games like Brotato are so dangerous for people who enjoy roguelikes. The runs are short enough that you can squeeze one into a spare moment, but the progression systems give you a reason to keep playing long after that moment has passed. You can jump in for a quick session, finish a handful of waves, and put the game down without feeling like you’ve abandoned some massive narrative or unfinished mission. On the other hand, if you find a character or build that clicks with you, it’s remarkably easy to lose an entire evening trying to make it work.

I appreciate how much the game respects that flexibility. A run can be brief if things go badly, while a successful attempt can keep you occupied for considerably longer as you survive wave after wave of increasingly dangerous enemies. The individual encounters move quickly, and the breaks between them are short enough that the game never feels like it’s making you wait around for the fun to resume. You spend most of your time either dodging enemies and collecting materials or making decisions that will improve your chances of surviving the next wave. There is very little wasted time between those two activities.

That pacing makes Brotato an excellent game for handheld systems. I played on Steam Deck and Xbox Series S, and the experience was smooth on both. The straightforward controls and compact arena make it easy to pick up and play, while the relatively modest technical requirements mean that you don’t need a powerful gaming PC or an expensive console to enjoy it. This is exactly the kind of game I want on my Steam Deck: something that boots quickly, plays beautifully in short sessions, and doesn’t demand that I dedicate an entire afternoon just to make meaningful progress.

It also helps that the game is accessible in ways that many challenging roguelikes aren’t. You can adjust aspects of the experience, including enemy health, damage, and speed, giving you more control over how demanding a run becomes. That flexibility makes the game more approachable for newcomers while allowing experienced players to pursue a greater challenge. I love difficult games when I’m in the mood for them, but I also appreciate developers who recognize that not everyone wants to spend their evening getting beaten into the ground by the same encounter. Brotato gives players room to find the level of challenge that works for them.

Then there are the unlocks and achievements, which provide another layer of motivation for players who want to get everything out of the experience. With so many characters and possible builds to experiment with, there is plenty to work toward beyond simply completing a run. If you’re the type of player who enjoys checking off achievements or mastering different play styles, Brotato can keep you busy for dozens of hours. At its roughly five-dollar price point when I reviewed it, the amount of gameplay on offer is absurdly generous. This is the sort of game that makes you look at your purchase and wonder how the developer managed to pack so much replayability into something that costs less than lunch.

Simple Controls, Satisfying Action

One of the reasons Brotato works so well is that it doesn’t overcomplicate the basic act of playing. You move your potato around the arena using the analog stick or directional controls, weaving through enemies while your equipped weapons automatically attack according to their behavior and range. You don’t have to manage an elaborate collection of attack combinations or constantly switch between different weapons to keep your damage output going. Instead, you focus on positioning, movement, and survival while the build you’ve created does the work of turning your potato into an alien-killing machine.

That doesn’t mean the combat is entirely passive. The automatic shooting system allows you to concentrate on the movement that keeps you alive, and positioning becomes increasingly important as the arena fills with enemies. You need to recognize dangerous situations, find openings through the horde, and decide whether it’s worth risking a detour to collect materials. A powerful build can make you feel almost unstoppable, but getting surrounded or caught in the wrong position can still bring a run to an abrupt end. The simplicity of the controls allows the game to focus on those decisions rather than making you wrestle with the mechanics themselves.

I also love how the weapons contribute to the game’s personality. You can equip conventional firearms such as pistols, SMGs, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers, but the arsenal also includes melee weapons, sticks, stones, swords, axes, magic wands, and other bizarre tools of destruction. Some weapons work best at close range, while others allow you to attack from a distance or deal damage through special effects. Combining different weapons creates opportunities to build around particular attributes, and upgrading them can transform a modest loadout into something capable of handling the later waves.

The feedback is satisfying, too. Enemies fill the screen, weapons fire in every direction, and the arena becomes a chaotic mess of projectiles, explosions, and frantic movement as the waves get tougher. Yet the action remains readable enough that you can usually understand what is happening and react accordingly. The game doesn’t need elaborate animations or cinematic camera movements to make combat enjoyable; it relies on the rhythm of movement, the steady improvement of your build, and the satisfaction of watching your character become increasingly powerful. It is uncomplicated in the best possible way.

That combination of easy-to-understand controls and meaningful strategic decisions is the heart of Brotato. You can understand the basic loop within minutes, but learning how to build an effective character and survive more demanding waves gives you plenty of reasons to keep coming back. It is the kind of design that makes a game approachable without making it shallow, and that balance is much harder to achieve than it might appear.

Let’s talk about the value proposition, because Brotato is the sort of game that makes it difficult to justify spending more money on something that offers less entertainment. At around five dollars when I reviewed it, the game provides an enormous amount of replayability through its characters, weapons, items, unlocks, and difficulty options. You can spend hours experimenting with different builds, trying to complete runs with characters that require unconventional strategies, and chasing achievements without feeling as though you’ve exhausted everything the game has to offer. The low asking price makes it an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys roguelikes or wants a game they can keep returning to between larger releases.

The technical requirements are equally impressive. Brotato is not a graphical showcase, and it isn’t trying to be one, but its simplicity allows it to run comfortably on a wide variety of hardware. My experience on Steam Deck and Xbox Series S was smooth, and the game’s modest presentation means you don’t need an expensive machine to enjoy it. It is the sort of game that feels perfectly suited to handheld gaming, where its short sessions, straightforward controls, and replayable structure fit naturally into the way people actually use those devices.

That accessibility matters because Brotato doesn’t ask you to invest in an elaborate setup before you can start having fun. You don’t need to spend time configuring a complicated control scheme or learn an enormous set of mechanics before the game becomes enjoyable. The action is immediate, the menus are easy to navigate, and the game quickly gets you into the part that matters. For a genre built around repeating runs and learning through experimentation, removing unnecessary barriers is a major advantage.

It also makes Brotato a great travel companion. Whether you’re playing on a Steam Deck, a Nintendo Switch, or another handheld PC, the game is easy to pick up for a few waves and just as easy to put down when you need to move on with your day. It doesn’t require you to remember an elaborate questline or retrace your steps through a sprawling map, and you can enjoy it without worrying about losing track of a complicated narrative. You can simply play, experiment, and return whenever the mood strikes.

For all those reasons, Brotato is a fantastic example of a small indie game delivering an outsized amount of entertainment. Its value isn’t measured by the size of its world or the length of its campaign, but by how consistently it makes you want to play another run. A game doesn’t need a massive budget or an enormous presentation to justify its existence, and Brotato makes that point better than most.

Of course, Brotato isn’t perfect, and its biggest weakness is tied to the same simplicity that makes it so enjoyable. Visually, the game is functional rather than impressive. The arena has a fairly plain appearance, with a brownish background and relatively simple character and enemy designs. The potatoes are charming in their own way, and the weapons and effects give the screen plenty of activity, but this isn’t a game you’re going to boot up to show somebody how far video game graphics have come. If you’re looking for an artistic experience with elaborate environments, expressive cinematics, or a striking visual identity, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

I don’t consider that a dealbreaker because the art style serves the gameplay. The arena is easy to read, the enemies are recognizable, and the game’s visual simplicity means that the action doesn’t become unnecessarily difficult to follow when the screen fills with enemies and projectiles. Still, after dozens of waves and repeated runs, the presentation can start to feel repetitive. You’re spending a lot of time looking at variations of the same arena, and a greater variety of environments could have made the experience feel fresher over longer sessions.

I would have loved to see themed biomes that changed the atmosphere of the arena without compromising the game’s straightforward design. Imagine taking your potato through icy environments, volcanic wastelands, or alien swamps, with each area offering a different visual identity. Even if those locations didn’t introduce entirely new mechanics, the change in scenery would have given repeated runs a little more personality. The current presentation is perfectly serviceable, but a stronger sense of environmental variety could have elevated the experience.

The other missed opportunity is the lack of a meaningful narrative or stronger character identities. You unlock dozens of different potatoes, and their mechanics give them plenty of gameplay personality, but the game doesn’t do much to explain who these characters are or why they’re fighting their way through hordes of aliens. There isn’t a substantial story pulling you forward, and the characters don’t have the sort of motivations or relationships that would make you emotionally invested in their individual journeys. You’re here for the gameplay, and the game makes that clear from the beginning.

I recognize that a narrative isn’t necessary for a game like this to succeed. Brotato is built around short, repeatable runs, and a complicated story could easily interfere with the quick, immediate gameplay loop that makes it so addictive. I wouldn’t want the game to become bogged down in cutscenes or dialogue just for the sake of giving every potato a tragic backstory. Still, a little more world-building or environmental variety could have added personality without compromising the core experience. These are opportunities for improvement rather than major flaws, and neither comes close to outweighing how much fun I had playing the game.