Posted on: November 10, 2019
Tinyguardian
Verified ownerGames: 181 Reviews: 2
Fell apart midway
Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story had me intrigued because there were several titles in the series, and the Spy story spinoff, with references to spy films, stealth games and so on seemed fun enough to try out. I got the game on sale and tried it out. The cartoony designs are appealing enough, as are the puns on potatoes. The basic premise of the game is that you run a spy agency, recruit spies with different strenghts, train them up and send them on missions. Rinse and repeat as the game gets harder. However, where the game falls apart is that as the missions get harder, so too do the punishments for failure. Whenever you're about to start a new mission you've got to pick a "route" that matches as closely as possible the strengths of your various spies. You can mitigate weaknesses somewhat using tools you develop, and use certain abilities to improve your odds. However, the cost of getting the information on each obstacle (a door, camera, bystander, guard, etc), becomes increasingly more expensive, very often outweighing the reward. As a result of this, even 1 well researched but still risking operation can cost you time, money and all your spy tools and sends your spy into a recovery phase. Often your best chance is to unlock additional routes and hope they match your spies better, but I've found that later in the game their requirements are too high (usually because the obstacles are more lenient, or vice versa). Either way, in my first playthrough I went bankrupt twice, and game over'ed when I failed the main mission because I was trying to clear side quests to get enough money to train up to the main quest, and my "best" spy got caught because all the buffs from the tools couldn't offset his weakest attribute. Visually speaking, the cartoon graphics are alright, but the missions which you'd think would be the main attraction, is relegated to a tiny screen in the bottom left corner. Audio is sufficient and the story is adequate but nothing thrilling.
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