I'm not sure what I was expecting from its sequel after playing the first Holy Potatoes! plate-spinner sim, but "annoying Faster Than Light clone" wasn't it. Holy Potatoes! is a lighthearted, genre-hopping franchise that isn't so much unified by what I thought were the specific type of sims where you have to split your attention between multiple active nodes at once - your classic Diner Dash scenario - but rather a more general sim element that is represented differently depending on the narrative theme. With Holy Potatoes! A Weapon Shop?! (IGotW #86) that meant having a crew of blacksmiths working on item requests around the clock; in Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?! the goal is instead to keep moving while exploring planets for resources and getting into a lot of turn-based ship-to-ship battles.

The game's story features argumentative space-faring sisters who are scions of a legendary space hero turned notorious fugitive, who due to their family legacy are forced to keep jumping from galaxy to galaxy to elude the tyrannical Eclipse Empire. With a ragtag crew of underlings and dwindling supplies of cash, fuel, and materials, they attempt to stay one step ahead of their unstoppable antagonists while also solving quests and finding their fortune. Popping into each of the game's galaxies, the player can assign tasks to their crew - some are suited for weapon-manning duty on the bridge, while the more scientifically-inclined might be producing new weapons in the engineering bay or concocting passive bonuses in the research lab, the player's resources inventory permitting. However, the crux of the game isn't in this ship crew management aspect so much as it is the constant battles on the surface of the various planets you visit, which are only occasionally broken up by FTL-style choose your own adventure blurbs with randomized good or bad outcomes. The Holy Potatoes! people clearly saw a lot of comedy potential with the pathetically unfortunate cavalcades of misfortune that follow most FTL sojourns, sanding off the more brutal real-time aspects of FTL's panicky combat and retaining some small semblance of its past as an isometric hireling organizer sim with its crew distribution aspect.

I can't say the game is all that bad, though there's a certain irritation inherent to the way your weapons get regularly blown up and there's no means to recover them without bailing from whatever exploration you were doing to go replace them or repair your hull - this means jumping back to the hub space station or wasting a couple of turns to build a new weapon to replace it, cutting into the limited amount of time you're alloted in each system before the Empire shows up and you're forced to bounce. FTL lost all its charm and verve the fourth or fifth time I was annihilated by the final flagship boss or hit one too many bad proc-gen scenarios on the trot, and the prospect of facing that again while cartoon potatoes made jokes about space kitties and farts didn't really feel like something I wanted to be involved with any longer than I needed to be.

I will say in Holy Potatoes! We're in Space?!'s defense that I didn't anticipate that the developers would veer so wildly from their previous project's blueprint. I started that first game because I didn't quite know what to expect from this series, and the second has only proven that it'll continue to produce unexpected results for as long as it keeps going. I may not have any desire to keep playing We're in Space?! but I can't fault its developers for choosing to reach for the stars, as it were.

Rating: 3 out of 5.