Holy Potatoes! We're In Space!? is a spaceship management game where you guide Cassie and Fay on search for their grandfather, whilst outrunning a bounty hunter. Since it is in the Holy Potatoes series, it features celebrity parody characters, and plenty of bad vegetable puns.
Each galaxy has a story mission to complete which will involve navigating to planets in that subsystem. You have limited time, which is called Sol, to complete the mission then return to the Hub to move onto the next galaxy. If time runs out, you battle the bounty hunter who is unbeatable - so it is game over. Moving to another planet, exploring the planet, or waiting costs 1 sol. Travel and exploring costs fuel.
You need to often quickly return to the Hub to refuel and restore hull and weapon integrity. In the Hub, there is also a shop, where you can purchase upgrades, materials, buy and sell weapons and hire crew.
Your ship (once upgraded) has a Training, Research Crafting and Therapy rooms. All of which can be upgraded to allow extra capacity and extra benefits. So the better research rooms have a percentage chance of instant completion, for example. You have a couple of crew members to start with, and eventually you can hire up to 10. You start off with 2 guns but this can be increased up to 4, and you need a crew member to man each individual gun. The others you will be using to craft, train, research or be on standby, and reassign as required. Each crew member initially has 2 skills and 2 free slots. The Training room can unlock the empty slots and level up the others up to level 5. Some characters start with a Mastery skill which can't be upgraded.
You need to be crafting as many weapons as you can since you need to sell them to top up your cash reserves. You will find more weapons than you can hold, and you will need the money for the room upgrades and research.
There's many creative weapons and it is fun trying them out and coming up with combos that work well together. Weapons have health, damage, accuracy, critical hit, then perks. When you craft the weapon, you are shown the letter rank like C -up to SS class. Each weapon will have slight variations in its attributes as described with a description like “Efficient” which will lower the energy cost (or “Inefficient” which raises it), or “Unstable” that lowers accuracy. Others include “Tanky”, “Improvised”, “Mastercrafted”, “Precise”, “Lucky”, “Stable”, “Ferocious” and more. So there is a random chance involved and modified by your character's ability when crafting. This means you can craft from a duplicate blueprint and get a slightly better/worse weapon.
The weapon types fall into several categories. Lasers are good for single targets, Shrapnel hit many random targets, Missiles hit a main target but do splash damage to others, Wave hit all, then Railguns ignore shields. There are "Unique" weapons which are where you find the bizarre- looking and gimmicky creations. You can acquire these multiple times so they aren't Unique in the sense that there is one of them.
When using the Explore option, you will encounter several random events or battles. The planets have a size, difficulty, hostility rating, weather conditions and resources. Size determines how many events you go through when exploring. The events are often multiple choice which mainly have a set answer, so when you see a repeat, you know exactly what leads to the correct outcome. Weather conditions affect the battles and add extra buffs/debuffs like lower accuracy, or do damage per turn.
The battles are turn-based, and you choose which guns to fire depending on your energy reserves, and choose to target your opponent's guns or hull. you gain energy depending on your energy capacitor, and each weapon has an associated cost to fire.
You regenerate a small amount of your shield (depending on your shield generator upgrades of course), which by default protects your hull, but can be moved to specific weapons. Your opponent will do the same.
If you destroy all guns, your opponent will offer to surrender. If you turn it down they will either prepare to ram you or prepare to flee. If you want to fully destroy them, it's often beneficial to at least partially damage the hull, overwise the ramming may do a serious amount of damage to you. Fully destroying them only really seems to give you a fuel bonus. I expected to get better rewards for not destroying their weapons, but you seem to get rewarded with money if you destroy them, and additionally then get the chance of being rewarded with the weapon blueprint for one of the weapons.
You unlock abilities across the game which mostly cost energy to use. You can switch between your 2 captains but I just stuck with the same one. The captain I used unlocked abilities for higher critical hit chance, increased evasion, increased attack but at the expense of lower defence, ram ability, and health restoration per turn.
The boss battles are sometimes multi-stage so they either regenerate their weapons or the ship transforms. But you may be blocked from targeting the hull until you take out the weapons.
In terms of guns, I found accuracy is very important early on as it can make a massive difference. Due to the turrets having limited healing, blasting multiple targets didn't seem too beneficial early on. Later on as the damage scales and enemies had more turrets, damaging multiple targets seemed much more worthwhile.
If your weapon is destroyed, you have lost that weapon permanently (apart from when you have a late-game research), you have to carry on that exploration session without being able to switch it out (unless you escape), and your crew member needs to stay in the Therapy room for a few Sol. Assuming you have equipped your best weapons, and are probably struggling for cash early on, destroyed weapons are a massive problem.
Initially, I didn't realise you could reload, and given that I rushed through the first couple of galaxies, I hit a point where I was completely screwed because I couldn't seem to help losing a weapon but then I then couldn't acquire the resources for any upgrades. After starting the game again, making sure I use all my Sol exploring before leaving the galaxy, and reloading when I mess up - it was significantly easier. Your reload options are from the Last Sol, Last Hub visit, or when you entered the Galaxy. If none of those autosave positions are suitable then you have to start again. When the game is around 22 hours, it's not really the kind of game you would replay or be that inclined to restart if you were far in the game.
The game really drags towards the end because some areas have way too many days. I suppose you could progress early but then maybe you will struggle, so I didn't want to risk that again. Near the end of the game, I had maxed out the upgrades and my resources were just ever-increasing. My experience was that the game gets easier as you progress.
Towards the end, I think I had a great combination of weapons that were surprisingly low-cost. For 4 energy, I could do minimum 367 damage but does double when targeting the hull, and since it was a Missile - it would hit multiple targets with splash. For 2 energy I had a railgun for minimum 261 which also buffed other weapons with a strengthen buff. For 2 points I had a 546 constant damage Laser. Then to go all out on the hull I had a 8 energy cost, single use gun which does at least 1352 damage. Since the railgun could increase the base strength, plus combining with the abilities like increasing critical hits or base damage - I could wipe many late-game enemies in a few turns by going straight for the hull, occasionally one-turn killing them.
The game seems to take some inspiration from “FTL: Faster Than Light” but then stretches the length of the game, and puts a Potato spin on it with more management and crafting. It’s enjoyable but stretches the game length a bit too much. The game suffers from the same problems of “Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop!?” which was also too long and became too easy.