Developer: Daylight Studios
Publisher: Daylight Studios
Rrp: £10.99 (Steam), £11.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 13th of July 2015
Available on: Steam and Humblebundle
Played using: Mouse and Keyboard
Your Grandfather, may his soul rest in potato heaven, has left you a weapon shop in his will. Now you have to make the item shop great again! Sell your weapons across the whole potato world and become the greatest weapon shop ever!
In case you can’t tell, this game is a simulator in the vein on Game Dev Tycoon or Recettear. The main difference being that in this case the world is inhabited by sentient potatoes.
The basic idea of the game is to hire Smiths in to create your weapons, keep them happy and paid (with a currency called $tarch) while balancing the books to make enough profit to keep growing. A basic premise but one that works well and many other games have thrived off of it.
Your Smiths basically do all the work, they forge the weapons, explore the places you unlock, get the raw materials for the job and research new weapons. Getting them to do these actions means they aren’t available to forge the weapons on your workshop of course so you have to try and balance it out.
You’re not idle of course, you a have to order said Smiths to do these things, manage the workshop as a whole as well as keep your Smiths happy which may mean sending them off on a paid vacation.
Your Smiths level up in various skills the more that you use them, such as being a merchant or explorer as well as their ‘Smithing skill’. Your Smiths basically come in four flavours; craftsman, designers, metalworkers and enchanters. While a Smith can take on any position they will produce much better results when placed in the right position.
Later in the game your Smiths can change job roles and learn a new skill.
The more, and better, weapons you create and sell the more fame and $tarch your store will garner. Once the hero has bought the weapon it’ll be given a grading that’ll let you know how it fared, obviously you want it to get a higher grade as that will give you more fame.
So, now the question is ‘what’s this fame actually for?’ Fame is the thing that lets you progress through this game, accruing fame is the only way to get tickets which in turn are the only way to unlock new places to travel to.
The more advanced weapons require resources that you can’t generally buy from stores, thankfully they can be found while exploring, although that requires a little luck. They also require you to research them which can take quite a bit of time and occupies a Smith entirely.
As you complete objectives the storyline of Agent 46 extorting you progresses. Personally I didn’t find it all that engaging, perhaps it’s because I’ve gone through a similar storyline in Recettear, except Recettear also has a second storyline along with a bunch of smaller side quests.
It isn’t often you’ll hear me complain about this sort of thing but the way the UI works could have been made to be more efficient. An example of this is when I want to restock on basic resources, I shouldn’t have to click on the + symbol ten times to buy ten iron. I should be allowed to type in a figure or have a slider of some kind to indicate how much I want. That complaint might sound nit picky but it really makes a lot of difference in management type games.
I can’t recommend this game, not when there is another game that does near enough the same thing except in a more fleshed out and polished way. I had some fun with it at the start but it just felt very shallow and I quickly grew bored of the main mechanic. It was just too repetitive, honestly go spend an extra £2 on Recettear and have a much more enjoyable experience.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Game Dev Tycoon
Holy Potatoes! We’re In Space?!
Recettear
