Maybe I should have looked up the game before playing, but I naïvely assumed that this follow-up to Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! would be more of the same only instead of the sort of fantasy setting of that game, I’d be creating weapons in a more sci-fi environment. Which, I suppose, you do. But actually, it’s a turn based RPG.

Whereas in Weapon Shop you just made weapons for other spuds, here you’re actually pilot of a spaceship and you travel to planets and fight baddies in other space ships. You have a crew (who you can recruit, train and “upgrade”), you have up to four weapons slots on your ship, and you fight in a very JRPG way Only in space with spaceships.

Yes, you create weapons, but that’s nowhere near as in-depth as it was before. So was I disappointed? I was. Very. But only for a while because once I got over the fact it was a totally different game (albeit with at least one connection to Weapon Shop), I really got in to the way it all worked and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Except for one thing.

As part of the plot, you’re being constantly hounded by an evil organisation. You warp to a solar system, then have to travel round the planets, complete some tasks, and then warp out before so many “sols”, the unit of time here, run out and you’re caught. This mechanic totally ruins the game for me. You’re always short of time and every time you fly to a planet, or explore one, or return to the “hub” in the system to refuel, repair your ship or buy resources, you use up sols and there just doesn’t seem to be enough. You go into battles feeling unprepared because you’ve gambled that you might waste too many sols recuperating after the previous one, and you never get a chance to properly explore each region of space as there simply isn’t time to do it. Luckily, you can turn “limited sols” off, so I did. Much better.

That aside, it’s a nice little game with some silly characters and homages to, well, everything, and a really good battle system with action points and stuff.

89p? Well why not. The two other Holy Potatoes games were also 89p each, so I got them as well. Yes, I know I have them on Steam already. Shut up. You’re not my mum.

I’d played a little bit of this before and seem to remember it’s one of those management type games, like the Kairosoft ones, only you’re potatoes and you run a weapon shop. I mean, you could have discerned much of that from the title of the game, but I was right. That’s exactly what it is.

You make weapons, sell them to heroes, they pay you depending on how well you made it and how close to their preferred weapon type or attributes it is, and you use that money to hire and train staff, buy materials, and purchase shop upgrades and holidays for your overworked tubers. As you advance, you open new areas and have more people to please, weapons to make and so on.

it’s pretty addictive, if a little clunky (it’s clearly designed for a mouse driven system and joypad controls aren’t great), but definitely worth 89p.