Pota-Toss World Tour Review

The success of Angry Birds means that there will inevitably be copycats, and the fact of the matter is there have been plenty to grace the App Store already. In the case of Pota-Toss World Tour, it’s the latest in a long line of spinoffs with just enough differences to make it feel unique yet still derivative. Despite its predecessor’s focus on GPS-based levels and intriguing locales, the follow-up feels stunted and more than a little lazy. Perhaps the potatoes featured in Pota-Toss World Tour are actually couch potatoes rather than the adventurous spuds seen in action in the original game. 

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Even bouncing potatoes aren’t enough to make Pota-Toss World Tour intriguing.

The success of Angry Birds means that there will inevitably be copycats, and the fact of the matter is there have been plenty to grace the App Store already. In the case of Pota-Toss World Tour, it’s the latest in a long line of spinoffs with just enough differences to make it feel unique yet still derivative. Despite its predecessor’s focus on GPS-based levels and intriguing locales, the follow-up feels stunted and more than a little lazy. Perhaps the potatoes featured in Pota-Toss World Tour are actually couch potatoes rather than the adventurous spuds seen in action in the original game.

Pota-Toss World Tour

Pota-Toss World Tour finds you selecting and deploying a fixed number of potatoes or plant-like beings across numerous stages spanning North America to the United States, to add-on downloadable content like Oceania. To advance, you must pelt advancing enemies with your crazy potatoes. This is achieved much the same way as Angry Birds, by aiming and flicking the potato across the screen in order to hit the target. Sometimes they’re rolling, angry veggies, and sometimes they’re enemies that need to be bonked on the head in order for them to disappear. No matter the case, if you can’t accomplish the level’s objective with the number of units offered for each stage, it’s game over and you’re back to the drawing board.

Regular potatoes are good for being tossed at advancing enemies, plants can become a potato quite quickly for a delayed effect, and other spuds can be used in surprising ways to fend the advancing enemies off. This isn’t always nearly as straightforward as you might think. You’ll need to puzzle out the most effective ways to kill the angry potato nemeses rolling your way, so flicking your own units at them simply isn’t the best way out of most stages. Still, even with this attempt at variety the game ends up feeling quite linear and dull. It doesn’t explore your location with GPS-based generation the way the previous game does, and its own locales are flat and boring. There’s not much to look at, save from occasional billboards dotting the landscape, and even those aren’t very entertaining.

Pota-Toss World Tour

The problem lies mainly within the fact there just isn’t much to do here. Aside from barebones social features, an in-game store with rudimentary power-ups and T-shirts emblazoned with the game’s logo, you’ll spend most of your time rolling on through the extremely simple series of levels in random locales based on the real world. Flicking potatoes doesn’t feel particularly entertaining, and more like a watered-down version of the apps that came before it. Eliminating some of the evil potatoes can be aggravating when you misjudge your speed and angle of approach, and in all it feels less polished than the industry standard that should be measured when it comes to touch-enabled gaming. At least it’s got one great thing going for it: the impossibly addictive menu music. Try getting that out of your head after each play session.

Pota-Toss World Tour

Pota-Toss World Tour needs to be beefed up with additional content, more engaging levels, and quite possibly new objectives before it can measure up to its predecessor. As it stands, it’s a bland solo flick-based timesink, and you’ll have it completed before you know it. More levels are being planned if the level select screen is to be believed, but for now we recommend sticking with the much deeper and intriguing Pota-Toss, complete with GPS augments. 

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      60 out of 100
      Fueled by horror, rainbow-sugar-pixel-rushes, and video games, I've been covering various types of media for nearly five years now. Find my work at Destructoid, GameSpot, GamesRadar, About.com, and more.