Brotato: Fun To Learn, Boring to Master

 

Vampire Survivor clones are generally a genre I stay away from.   Vampire Survivor was a fun little thing to mess around with for a day or two when taking a break from work or whatever but it wasn't exactly some incredible, ground breaking game that changed my life.  It did however, seem to make a metric fuckton of money and therefore has been added to the list of things to copy wholesale by the indie scene and Brotato is a product of that complete lack of creativity from your average indie developer.  The game, however, was gifted to me by a viewer and despite my cynical comments about it, it is pretty good.

The one thing that's interesting about this game, and maybe the whole genre in general is that it's an incredibly fun time for the first handful of runs that you do and then interest dies quickly as you learn what makes the game tick.  When you first fire up Brotato and start a run you are confronted with a ton of shit that you must wrap your head round regarding the characters stats and equipment.  Do you stack HP? Or is it more effective to prioritize dodge and armor?  Is it worth spending your precious level up upgrades on Harvesting and Luck? Or should you be upping your damage instead?  Should you buy that item that ups your speed but tanks your range?  Maybe you should be changing out your weapons for more damage or lifesteal.  It's incredibly fun at first to get your head around this stuff, experiement and work it all out.

But then you do work it out.  What I've found works for me is getting some luck and harvesting early on, then armor, dodge and HP and then focusing on my damage output and doing that has basically guaranteed me a win with every character so far.  I've also found that the Engineering stat along with buy shittons of turrets is an absolutely busted way to play that makes the gameplay trivial even on it's highest setting called Danger 5.  I am, at time of writing, about half way through the large cast of characters and I'm at the point where I'm sort of glazing over as I play.  I'm not thinking anymore and just going through the motions each time.

This doesn't happen with other games though.  Brotato reminds me quite a lot visually of The Binding of Isaac and mastering that games gameplay and RNG didn't result in a boring experience.  I stopped playing Isaac because I had done pretty much everything in it that there was to do and I wasn't on the verge of falling asleep with each run that I did because the better you got and the more you understood about it, the harder it got and more intense challenges were thrown at you.  Brotato doesn't have that kind of scaling and once you learn how to do 20 waves then it's extremely simple to win every time after that.  Maybe you'll lose a run here and there if you don't get good items for the little egg man that you play as but outside of getting buttfucked by randomness the game is extremely easy.  

However, what I'm not saying with any of this is that Brotato is a bad game.  The game has been incredibly useful for me as a new father because it's a perfect game to play when holding a sleeping baby.  I can play it pretty much exclusively with one hand and I can leave it running between ways if I have to run away to do baby stuff.  I'm not going to lose my flow or forget what I'm doing, it's perfect for sqeezing in a quick session in a busy schedule.  I wish it had more music and there was more to the areas than just a square that fills with enemies, maybe some extra levels with obstacles or maybe mazes to have to deal with and navigate would have been a fun addition but for what it is, a shameless Vampire Survivors clone, it's pretty solid.

If you like these kind of games and you need a new one to fiddle with then Brotato is absolutely worth picking up but otherwise your money might be better spent on something a little more involved.

Friday the 13th

God I remember all the buildup for this game.  Every other day on Facebook one of those videos from some weird baity gaming page would post a trailer or some game play footage like "erh muh gerd looks so good" and then the game actually came out and it sort of just vanished from existence.  Anyway thanks to a friend I've finally had a chance to give it a go.

The short version of this post is that if you followed the hype train then you'll probably be disappointing by how the game turned out but for me, I thought it looked a bit shit to begin with so I was actually pleasantly surprised.  Nothing special but a fun little game that you could happily kill a few hours with.

The game itself is pretty simple.  You join an online lobby with a bunch of people and everyone chooses a camp counselor and a Jason.  Which characters are available is dependent on your level which seems a little bullshitty to me since each character does seem to be a little bit different but whatever, you get EXP pretty quickly.  Once the game starts, one player is assigned to be the Jason and everyone else has to run away.  The goal is to escape or survive until the end of the timer for the counselors and to murder everyone for Jason.

On each map there are a number of objectives which involve things like repairing a car or calling the police and doing this will help speed up your escape but the items required for this are placed randomly throughout the map so if you want to get it done, working with other players might be a good idea although I'm playing the game in a busy bar with no voice control so for me that's pretty much impossible.  For Jason it's just a case of kill as many people as you can but you're a slow bulky piece of shit so you have a few powers to help you out like the ability to sense players or teleport around the map.  Once everyone is dead or has escaped the game ends and you're given experience with which you unlock characters and perks and whatnot.  Then you do it all again till the end of time.

I have two major problems with what limited time I've had with the game.  The first being that Jason just isn't fun to play AT ALL.  Maybe it's because I'm bad but he's super unwieldy and just sort of needlessly hard to use.  It's hard to articulate but maybe if you try the game you'll know what I mean but generally the counselors are just a lot more fun to play.  My other problem is that the game is buggy to fuck.  The worst bug I saw was when another friend of mine was playing Jason and I don't quite know what happened but the HUD vanished and he was completely locked out of using his powers and couldn't smash doors and stuff properly.  Eventually he got lucky an someone clocked him in the face with a frying pan and when he came out of the stun all his shit came back.  One other minor annoyance is that if the player controlling Jason drops from the game then the game just instantly fucking ends.  I get why but couldn't thay have maybe just let a bot Jason take over or something?

Either way, while Friday the 13th is nothing special it's at least a bit of mindless fun for a few hours.  I imagine if you get a team of good counselors and a Jason that actually knows what he's doing it could be pretty intense but unfortunately every game I've played/witnessed up to now seems to be populated with dribbling children but that isn't exactly the games fault.  Not something I'd pay full price for but put that shit on a Steam sale and I'll pick up my own copy eventually.

Don't Starve

Well this was a pleasant surprise.  Yet another game I got during a steam sale for absolutely no money thanks to the sale of DotA2 items and my only regret with this purchase is that I didn't install it and start playing it sooner.

Don't Starve was released in April of 2013 by Klei Entertainment and I'm sad to say that when I first saw the game I turned my nose up at it.  I saw a dude running around a randomly generated world picking up things and using those things to build stuff and straight away thought that this was another shallow indie game trying to ride the coat tails of Minecraft with it's gimmick being a proper art style rather than block graphics.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Don't Starve is a game where you run around randomly generated worlds picking things up and using them to build other things, that much is true, but really it's more than that.  It's a game of survival where there isn't really an end goal but you're aiming to survive for as long as possible in an extremely harsh environment.  There are 4 really obvious ways to die in this game but only 1 of them involve actually starving.  The others involve being mauled by monsters, going insane and being killed by some strange thing in the pitch black darkness of the night.

The game play is simple point and click stuff, you click on the thing you want to collect or use and item on and it does it.  You can use WSAD or clicking to move your guy and the Q or E keys to move the camera.  From there you are told absolutely nothing and you basically have to fend for yourself, which in my opinion is great.  On the side there is a big list of stuff you can create and it tells you what you need to make them so you can set yourself a target for that gadget you want and then go exploring.

Really it's best to build yourself up a base of operations with the science machines and a fireplace and explore outwards from there and build yourself up over a long period of time.  As you explore you'll discover all sorts of weird shit that even after sinking a few hours into the game I've still not found a use for.  I found a strange gold ring surrounded by evil plants and a gnome doll that both have no immediate use and I know that I'm only scratching the surface of weird collectibles in that game.

When you do die (and you will die eventually) your character is deleted and you will be forced to start again completely from scratch.  This gives you more incentive to really work hard for your survival and not just give up the ghost but dying also gives you experience which is used to unlock other characters all with unique perks that will alter the game play a bit so that surviving with just basic guy doesn't get too stale.

Really I can't say more than that but I've not really even begun to experience all the content.  There is a lot of stuff here and it's being updated frequently.  In fact, I think there is about 6 or 7 days until the next Don't Starve update.  Seriously though, play this game, it's fucking great.