izigame.me

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of Godot Engine, the game engine used by Brotato, which is how I first heard of the game. But I'm also a fan of indie games and I've been playing Brotato for my own enjoyment, so my review is from a player's perspective.
I LOVE IT.
It's just so much fun. I've played a bit of Vampire Survivors, the game which seemed to (re)start the craze around this kind of arcade action games now dubbed "horde shooters" or "reverse bullet hell games".
Brotato seems heavily inspired from this genre, but refines it a TON on all aspects: graphics, sound design, gameplay variety and replayability. I've played it over 15 hours in just a week and I'm itching to play more.
My favorite feature is the insane variety that you'll find in what kind of build you can play. Like most such games, you start with a basic set of stats which you can influence (both positively and negatively) with level-up upgrades (e.g. +5% damage, +3% speed, etc.), and weapons and passive items that you buy between runs with the collected materials. You can equip up to 6 weapons (aside from a couple exceptions) and combine them in ways that make sense for the build you're going for, and the items you buy or acquire influence your stats passively. There's a significant impact of randomness here, but it's well designed - the game learns from your start weapon, and the items and weapons you acquire early on, and tends to pick random purchase options that make sense to develop you build. E.g. if you start with a "medical" weapon, you'll be proposed more medical weapons early on (and also other types, but your starting one - or the type of other weapons you'll acquire - weighs more in the balance and helps you focus on one or more types if you want).
Then what makes the game absolutely amazing to me is the variety found in the characters. Each character that you can choose has a set of bonuses and penalties that affect the base stats, and guide your build heavily in some direction.
Some examples:
- Crazy, +100 Range with Precise weapons (knives, etc.), +25% Attack Speed, starts with an extra Knife, -30% Dodge, -10 Engineering, -10 Ranged Damage. You can imagine what kind of build is favored: stack fast Precise weapons with high critical chance like knives, and carve your way through the waves while making sure not to get hit, as you definitely won't dodge. You'll probably want some Life Steal :)
- One-Armed: +200% Attack Speed, All Damage modifications are increased by 100%, you can only equip ONE weapon at a time. So you're super fast to hit, you can make a build that will reach insane amounts of damage per second, but you'll be limited to a single weapon.
- Masochist: In short, starts with -100% damage (does only 1 damage per hit), but gets +5% damage whenever they get hit... so after 20 hits you're at +0% damage modifier, and everything after that is pure damage increase goodness. So you have to balance hurling yourselves on enemies to get hit but without reaching 0 HP - and your base stats help you with that thanks to +10 Max HP, +3 Armor and +25% HP Regeneration.
That should give a hint of what's possible - the game (as of Early Access in Oct 2022) has a whopping 30 characters, all very different from each other and leading to very varied builds (you start with maybe 6 characters and unlock the rest while winning on various levels of difficulty with various characters).
Long story short: it's amazing, pick it up!