Brotato is a highly-polished indie single-stick auto-shooter that was released on Console last month. It spent about a year in early access on PC, got a full release last summer, and has received a couple ports since. It’s pretty good, but there’s not really a lot to talk about, so this should be a quick one.

Brotato drew a lot of obvious comparison to Vampire Survivors, what with being a single-stick game, but to me it’s mechanically far more similar to SNKRX. Similar to both games, you move a player character around who shoots automatically based on cooldowns, and navigate through an arena full of endlessly spawning enemies who have a variety of simple attacks like “run at you” and “shoot at you” and occasionally “charge and run at you”. Unlike Vampire Survivors, and far more like SNKRX, you’re only expected to survive for 20-60s killing mobs and hoovering up crystals, then you enter the Buy Phase. Like so many other auto-battlers you spend your cash during this Buy Phase buying either “Items” (that modify stats) or “Weapons” which you can merge to upgrade. Your goal is to survive 20 rounds and then optionally defeat a boss that spawns.

…and that’s sort of it? There aren’t a jillion different weapons, there’s about 8 or so different sets of 6 weapons and probably 20 or so different items. The real variation comes in alternative ’tatos you can unlock, which primarily have stat-based modifiers – like +big bonuses to ranged / -big penalties to melee, or +200% xp / +50% shop costs – but some have truly unique modifiers like “you have 12 weapon slots instead of the normal 6, but each weapon stacks on a -5% total damage penalty”. There’s like 40 of these options, all with their own unlock criteria, plus 5 or 6 difficulty tiers.

That sounds like a lot, but from what I’ve played the lack of weapon/item variety combined with 20 levels worth of itemization means most endgame-viable builds end up pretty similar. The game is good, it’s super polished, but It’s not a must-play genre-defining masterpiece. I only played it because it launched on Xbox on Game Pass. If you can get it on Game Pass or find it on a Steam sale for a dollar, go for it!