Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! Review

In any immediate sense, Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! belongs on platforms it has already appeared on. You wouldn’t smithy your way to a pacifist market if weapons like axes, bows, and fire wands were your bread and butter. Android and other mobile devices, including the Nintendo Switch which now plays host to the title, make for much better grinding, sharpening, or forging. All of this isn’t to say that you don’t do anything or go anywhere while playing around with your weapon shop.

In fact, one of the first places you might find yourself other than a sales trip to Noob Village happens to be the fabulous yearly awards show. Grindy games like this have to tempt the player with something and the awards offer more than just a sneak peek at weapons you can make after research efforts. That there are other weapon shops necessitates the competitive spirit.

Not merely ensuring a few smiles in its writing, Holy Potatoes! also teased my economic sense one way while pushing the difficulty appropriately the other. With four potato-smiths including Laura Craft and Bulk Bogan, I thought tackling a special request a few times over would let me mash potato to the next expansion of my shop. You can invite special crafts-potatoes to work on projects and reap the stat boosts associated with each. Doing so brought me so close to fulfilling the request, that I figured I needed to try again. The dastardly Agent 46, the antagonist to your developing tuber, visited and demanded a minimal sum for allowing me to work, but the staff wages broke the bank.

Never fear, the guild will bail players out and development of smithy skills may actually demand planning around this seemingly near-fail state. Three bail-outs and you’ll be foreclosed upon. Changing jobs costs money, buyers can sometimes prove fickle, and workers will want to go on vacation. I don’t play these games all the time, but Holy Potatoes! matches the gold standard in my mind when stacked against Game Developer Story, a title I gnawed thoroughly on iOS. This genre doesn’t seem to have a long way to go with all the simulators considered.

You can jump to a middle ground of weapon shop development from the title screen if you wish, but I found myself wanting more than just the fast forward button or the dog to feed. It’d be cool if the developers included a fire to fan, an optional rhythm game for the pedal spinning a sharpening stone, or a series of button inputs for enhanced magical stats. These are small spuds compared to the solid gameplay on hand.

I reviewed the game on PS4 with a code provided by the publisher.

Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! PS4 Review