Ahh, Hot Potato is such a difficult game to review. For one thing, it’s hard to even describe; beyond that, it’s such an unusual gameplay experience that there’s little to compare it to. The closest thing I can imagine is an old SNES puzzle game called Zoop.

Some people have called this game a puzzle/shooter combination; that is actually rather inaccurate. Hot Potato is no more a shooter than Bust a Move or Tetrisphere. Yes, you shoot objects as a means of solving puzzles, but you can’t just indiscriminately fire off potatoes and expect to survive for even a few seconds.

A brief description of the gameplay: Hot Potato is played on vertically-scrolling streets. You control a mini-bus full of potato-shaped aliens, two rows of three. The streets are full of red and blue potatoes, and you have to fire off your potatoes in groups of three to clear out the streets. If two of the same color connect, they’ll be cleared out; opposite colors will just pile up and make the problem worse. Hot Potato’s challenge lies in the fact that you always have to shoot the potatoes three at a time...so you spend most of your time rotating and flipping the bus’s selection in hopes of matching up with a set of three on the street.

For the first couple of hours, this is quite amusing. The “mission mode”, in which you have to take out a certain breed of potato in addition to just clearing a path through the street and surviving, starts out slowly enough for you to learn the gameplay basics. Then it ramps up very quickly in challenge and frustration.

Hot Potato lacks nothing in style. Right off the bat, you realize how weird and nutty this game is...and that’s cool. Every tiny potato sprite is fully animated, though it’s hard to appreciate during the high-intensity gameplay. The story is funny and not as childish as you’d expect, and the game’s manual is actually quite an entertaining read. The potato “voices” are fitting, and the music sounds like a guy flapping his lips with an index finger...yeah.

The real problem with Hot Potato is lack of longevity, and that’s mostly due to the game’s pitifully narrow scope. There are only two modes, mission and score, and they’re both 99% the same thing. No training, no marathon, no “puzzle” mode, no time trial, no multiplayer. The game options are a joke, and the aforementioned “lip flapping” song is the only gameplay tune I ever heard. Puzzle games are meant to be addictive and played for a long time...so why am I forced to hear the same song over and over again? It says a lot for how un-polished this game is.

There’s no denying that Hot Potato is fun, at least for a little while, but there’s simply not enough to it for what third-party GBA software costs.