Have you ever wondered what would happen if a potato would come to life and run a weapon shop? I sure have! Welcome to our review of the game – Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! – Played on the Nintendo Switch.
In Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! (HPAWS) you manage a weapon shop in which you can expand its business across the potato plains. The game is published by Rising Star Games and developed by Daylight Studios, and was originally released in 2015 on PC and later on mobile. PC-owners are in luck, since there are two more games from the same developer out for them to play. Rumour has it these games will make their way to the Switch as well.. They are, if you are interested, Holy Potatoes – What the HELL & Holy Potatoes, We’re in Space. If we have to name a genre for the game, it’s a combination between a simulation and tycoon, with potatoes.
Gameplay
The game itself isn’t that hard, even if you have never played a game like this before. You use your potato smiths to forge weapons and sell them to questing heroes. By doing so, you can upgrade your smiths, your smithies and gain new areas to explore. These areas give access to powerful artifacts you can use to make new weapons – etc. etc. etc. You get the point. During the game, you will meet more than 70 potato heroes, forge more than 200 weapons, expand your business into 20 wacky areas, manage 30 zany potato smiths, discover 10 legendary pop culture heroes . . . and even adopt a potato dog, which you can name yourself!
The game becomes a little tedious though, and thus addicting. Anyone who has ever played an idle clicker knows this concept. You want to continue, even though there isn’t a real endgame. I wanted to make wacky weapons, make more $tarch and get even better smiths, which of course resembled famous people.. but hey who cares. It’s Hulk Potato Hogan, and he’s doing my bidding. The more time you invest in the business, the more complex it becomes. This is where HPAWS becomes a full adult-no-more-kids-game. Managing your funds and not going bankrupt, while sending smiths on holidays, trading trips etc. If you fail, you could lose a lot of money or even valuable reputation points.
Mechanics on the Switch
The game forces you to play this game with Joy-Con detached from the screen. The font of the game is really small, so this was a real bummer. I was basically forced to play this game in docked mode, since I don’t always have a place to put my Switch in handheld mode. I personally had more fun playing this game in docked mode, since I could use my pro controller, which felt less tedious than the Joy-Con. The game responds a little slow sometimes and the pro controller makes it easier to work around the menu’s (in my opinion). This becomes even more clear when trying to move around your smiths or assigning them to different jobs. Should this be considered a bad port? Partly, since the touchscreen doesn’t work like it should and the detachable Joy-Con don’t really have extra value.
Since this is the first game in its genre on the Switch, most newcomers will be scared off by some of the functions HPAWS offers. The tutorial is mostly textbased, and by textbased, I mean really textbased. It throws huge heaps of text towards you, which you have to plow through with a mechanical potatoharvester (read: eyes). If you can work your way through the shoddy mechanics, the text-based tutorials, HPAWS is a gem in the making. I had fun with it, became addicted and want to start over – since I found out some tricks to make my playthrough more efficient.
Potatoclusion
Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! is a fun little game with more depth then meets the eye. It was not perfectly ported towards the Nintendo Switch, but hey, that’s what patches are for. If you can look past the text-based tutorial and sometimes cringy controls, you have a nice simulator-tycoon game on your hands. If you don’t know what to expect, check some footage on YouTube or Steam (Since I have the feeling the game works better on Steam..). I’m rating it with 60%.
Tested on Nintendo Switch
