izigame.me

One thing about Brotato that made it very good, and even better than Vampire Survivors in my eyes, was that you can actually lose once you’ve unlocked everything. It managed to strike the right balance of satisfying with its deep gameplay, strategy, having to think on the fly to adjust builds (though the game does have an issue with unwinnable runs when it just gives you unusable garbage), variety in a massive roster of characters, and tough but fair challenge. Brotato is my favorite game to go to when I just want to play a video game. There’s a reason why I have 362 hours in the game and will continue to play more. More of the base game content, anyway.
Legitimately, the biggest issue with the base game is what I call Check Your Work Moments when it comes to the dodge mechanic. To explain what that is, do you remember in school when your math teacher would walk around your class during a test? Do you remember when they’d walk by a poor student (hopefully not you), look at their paper, and then announce to the rest of the class to make sure to check their work when solving a problem? It was an obvious tell that the student had messed something up. In this case, someone needs to remind the developer of this game that when you have a 60% dodge chance, that does not mean you only dodge 1 in every 10 hits.
That’s it. That was the biggest issue in the entire game.
And then the Abyssal Terrors expansion came out.
I don’t know if the developer decided to delay the expansion because they were caught up watching track and field during the Summer Olympics while on the world's largest Touhou binge, but I can’t think of any other explanation for why it feels like the majority of regular expansion enemies have dashing attacks and why the Elite enemies all give out bullets like candy on Halloween. Nothing screams a fun experience like a Wave 18 Elite boxing you in with its thousands of bullets while some doofus that looks like a melting goblin shark charges you from off-screen and ends your run.
Want to know what else isn’t fun? Spawning in a Lamprey, an enemy that typically only spawns with an item or on Wave 20 of the base map, on Wave 4. I don’t care if it’s just a single Lamprey, the enemy isn’t meant to be spawning that early. There’s a reason why you have to take an item to spawn it under normal circumstances or have it spawn at the end of a standard run. You know, where the challenge of it makes sense. It reflects the decision to make the expansion difficult just for the sake of making it difficult. Along with that, buffing enemies start spawning on Wave 5, where buffing enemies don’t spawn until Wave 16 on the normal map. The new buffing enemies also have the added joy of having their own attack instead of just being buffing enemies.
It is bafflingly bad design from a game that was so tightly designed with its initial enemies. The worst elites in the base game, Croc and Mother, are only marginally worse than the best elites in Abyssal Terrors. It’s made even worse because the developer delayed the expansion and ran a beta test for a little over a week for some of the expansion content. Things aren’t even slightly overtuned. They’re fundamentally bad by design. You can nerf the numbers as much as you want, but that won’t change the fact that the enemies just suck by default, and that’s what’s annoying.
And annoying is a good way to put it. I wanted the expansion to be tough and challenging like Brotato is and always has been. I also wanted the expansion to be enjoyable. There isn’t any enjoyment to be had with the expansion in its current state. It’s just an annoyance that does the Elden Ring thing of mistaking obnoxious design choices for a riveting challenge.
What makes the bad enemy design so much worse is the bad character design. Not every character in Brotato is the fun, sexy pick that’s guaranteed to get you a win. Like some bad items, you do need bad characters for the sake of variety. I don’t know why it had to feel like most of the expansion characters were massively undertuned. Some of the decisions on release were baffling, like the Sailor character having its critical hit chance capped out at 20%. This was something that was quickly fixed in a patch, but it’s clear that it was never a decision that should have been allowed past the QA team for the expansion’s final release.
Looking past the wildly baffling bad decisions of Abyssal Terrors, it’s not all bad in the new content. Some of the new items are pretty cool, especially the Naval weapon class. Using all of them together is usually a fun time. The Black Flag item is awesome and it ties in well with the new Curse stat mechanic. Really, the Curse stat mechanic is where you’re going to get the most fun out of the new content. By adding a slightly random mechanic that makes enemies tougher, but also more rewarding, while having the chance to curse items for better effects (and adding more of the Curse stat) the developer managed to add a new layer of fun and challenge to the game.
The other pros are...the expansion is only a few dollars? Only one other pro there, sadly. I can’t even blame it on the expansion feeling unfinished like so many other games. The developer obviously put a lot of thought and work into the expansion, it just sucks that the decisions were so bad on a fundamental level that they made all the hard work result in something that’s just not fun to play. The upside to it all is that the expansion and new content can be fixed, but it will likely take months to get the new content to a point where it’s remotely enjoyable to play.
The excellent video game is still in here, and that is still worth your time. The regular game is still so fun, especially with the new Curse mechanic, that I almost feel bad giving the expansion such a negative review despite the drop in quality being so substantial.
I guess to get the most you can out of the new content, just play it on the base map and try to get as much as you can out of it that way. Otherwise, it’s simply not worth it.