Rich in $tarch.
Do you like meters?
Do you like watching meters go up, and making delightful little sounds when they finally fill?
How about charting the most efficient path to get to the best meters and getting them filled super duper good?
You love all of it, just admit it now. That's why you're here. So let's talk. Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?!, hereafter referred to as just Holy Potatoes, is of the meter-filling genre. You're going to be making the various meters go up and down in the various right ways, and trying to rack up as much profit as possible while working your way through a silly parody-filled storyline. In those respects, the game is not dissimilar to a fair few of its contemporaries.
But the devil is in the details, so let's talk details. And it all starts from the actual premise: Inheritor of your grandfather Batata's weapon shop, you the player are tasked with a simple, straightforward goal. Pull it back up from the dusty abyss and forge it once more into a mighty weapon empire, for heroes all across the land to give you their money!
Also all the characters are potatoes. I'm going to be entirely honest with you, I'm not completely certain why potatoes, but here we are. Your classically dim witted parody-work protagonist is here, you have your own weapon shop, and your grandfather's old partner (read capitalist exploiter) wanting to get the profit train running again. So how does a weapon maker turn a profit?
Why, by making weapons, of course. The central set of meters and mechanics in Holy Potatoes is the weapon-forging system. When you select a weapon to make out of one of the categories, it will ultimately have four major stats: Attack, speed, accuracy, and magic. Each of these, broadly speaking, comes from a given station in your workshop, which is manned (spudded?) by one or more skilled workers. A weapon will take a given amount of time and supplies to make, and in that time, your workers will pour in as much of their focus into the weapon as they can.
And naturally, just how much they can pour into a given weapon is decided, in no small part, by the level that each worker holds in a specific class. So you see where this loop of making meters fill up starts to come from.
But, okay. You made a dagger or whatever. Once you've got a few, you take them into a given locale, where one of your workers tries to drum up interested customers. And once they've gotten some of those, you get to decide who to sell each weapon to, based on your specific goals. Are you looking for just the maximum profit off of a bow, or are you willing to sell it to a less moneyed low-level adventurer so he can shoot up the ranks?
Oh, and individual heroes have preferences. Yeah, this ranger might like bows, but she also might love the Attack stat above all else, so now you have to push a bow entirely out of its normal stat pattern to force it to meet her needs, if you want her to pay what your efforts are actually worth.
And then you get their cash, bring it back to the shop, and start it all over again. With side excursions to send your workers out to buy supplies, research new weapons, go exploring, or take a vacation to boost their mood(and thus productivity)...But those create additional drains on cash, or at least time. And since your workers get paid, and earn raises, on the regular, time really is money.
Lining all these little growth patterns up into a good loop can, of course, be a bit addictive. But there's some really solid broad-stroke strategy here in being efficient, and prepping for the future. Good training in the right classes can ensure your workers are ready to go up into tiers that let them put way more of a mark on weapons, and that can really kick your profits up.
So, that said, where's the game stumble? I can think of...Three key places.
The first is a simple question of taste. This is a wacky parody game, and a lot of the writing is fitting that tone. (There's a potato man named Claude who needs an absurdly huge sword, that's what we're working with here) I find myself having a real on-and-off relationship with parodies, but you might be all for them. Or entirely done, for that matter.
Second, the interface is a little wobbly. It feels a lot like it was built for a touch or mouse interface first, and then ported to the Switch and given some functional, but imperfect, controller support. Which, as far as I can tell, seems to be exactly what happened. This isn't really a big deal in handheld where you can just tap the screen at points, but if you pretend your Switch is solely a home console, it's worth mentioning.
And last, but most frustrating, I had a few performance hiccups. Mostly of the "stutter when suddenly doing a new thing" variety, not so much the "struggle to continue doing a thing" type. But while the Switch isn't the most powerful thing on the market, it's certainly strong enough to run a solely 2D meter management sim without trouble.
So, I'm not gonna lie, those issues put a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste to my opinion of the game. There's a fair bit to like here if you're into the meter stuff, but there are some definite problems that come from being ported a bit roughly.
At the same time, I also have to admit I have a hell of a lot of respect for a company doing one-and-done purchaseable games on mobile, and I'm way more open to seeing these come to Switch than their whale-hunting F2P cousins.
What's the verdict, then? Well...I'm kind of caught in the middle. At the end of the day, I think this is worth looking at. I think the devs have put some really solid work into this. But when the game is cheaper and more intended for mobile, it's hard to give a full recommendation for the Switch version.
In the end, I leave it up to you, dear reader. Do as you will.