Is Brotato Primal Dread Worth It? Why Reviews Are Mixed

Primal Dread at a glance

The item count depends on where you read it. The store page and the launch post's bullet list say 40 new items. The same launch post later says "more than 30 new items and 3 new Pets," so the 40 most likely counts the pets and a few extras. Either way, this is the biggest content drop since Abyssal Terrors, and the developers say so themselves.

Checked: Steam review summaries per language, 20:42 UTC on November 3, 2026, with Steam's default filters.

BESTPRICE: Want Brotato? Eneba sells a Steam key: Buy on Eneba →

The Mixed score is mostly one language, again

Here's the number that explains the label. Simplified Chinese reviews make up 194 of the 476, about 41%, and they hold 134 of the 184 negatives. English reviews alone are Mostly Positive at 77%. Russian reviews are Very Positive, 49 of 52. Strip out one language and Primal Dread would not be Mixed.

That is also exactly what happened to Abyssal Terrors, which still sits at Mixed overall while English players rate it Very Positive. We saw the same shape on Slay the Spire 2, Very Positive in English and Mixed overall. So the label tells you less about this DLC than it seems to.

The timing is the other clue. Steam's daily histogram shows 119 positive and 23 negative reviews on November 2 (UTC), the launch day. November 3 had flipped to 141 positive and 163 negative so far when we read it at 20:42 UTC, with the day not yet over. Launch-day buyers liked it. The second day is when the balance complaints landed.

The Chinese reviews are not one complaint repeated. The most helpful one, from Zexally (107 people found it helpful), asks how anyone is supposed to move with "满地的坑洞+冲脸+弹幕" (our translation: pits everywhere, enemies rushing you, bullets on screen), and says they died on wave 4 of Nightmare. A shorter review sums the DLC up as too weak early and too strong late, and singles out the slow and acid damage over time.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Blobfish Games / Evil Empire)

That screenshot is from Blobfish's own store page. It's wave 4, and the floor is already mostly holes and puddles. The holes are new: the developers call them "the dreaded holes," and on Cephalopocalypse's first run they simply block your path. As far as he could tell, you can't fall in and die either, which is something.

GODEEPER: Brotato isn't the only expansion this year where the score and the content tell different stories; our review of the Dave the Diver jungle DLC covers another one where critics and players disagreed. Dave the Diver In the Jungle Review →

Evolution: the best idea in the DLC and the reason it's too easy

Evolution is a stat you push one of two ways by picking up drops on the map. Mecha turns you into a weapon shop: you collect mecha parts, spend them to upgrade weapons, and dismantle mecha weapons in the shop for more parts. Mutant copies your items' effects at random. Each side also changes the enemies. Mecha dinosaurs fire lasers and leave oil that slows you; mutant dinosaurs spread acid.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Blobfish Games / Evil Empire)

The idea is good. The numbers are not there yet. On Cephalopocalypse's launch-day run, one weapon with 53 mech parts hit for 6,500, and his reaction to the Brachiosaurus boss was "we just splattered it immediately." Players with real hours report the same thing. Assassin3838, with nearly 1,000 hours, puts their Nightmare win rate before the DLC at "probably < 5%." With it: "it feels hard to lose." Mechanize, they write, hands out "+7 ranged damage every turn." Another English review says every run ends in a win and the final boss dies within a second. A third says it eventually turns into an AFK Vampire Survivors, and promises to switch to positive once balance patches arrive.

That last line matters. A good share of these negatives are conditional. Even a positive review from ARCTIC_MOON is headlined "Evolution seriously breaks the game balance," and adds a design gap we'd flag too: cursed weapons can't be mechanized, so the Curse system and Mechanize work against each other.

The developers' patch 1.2.0.1 post on November 3 says they are fixing bugs first and "intend to address balancing in the coming days." The only Evolution number it touched went the other way: mutagens now drop more often, 3% instead of 2%.

If you just want the old difficulty back, the free 1.2 update added an Item Set menu on the character select screen. You can switch off Primal Dread, Abyssal Terrors or a free update such as Paws & Claws, per run. The catch is that it's the whole pack: turn off Evolution and the new characters go with it.

All 10 new characters, from the in-game cards

The Brotato wiki already lists all 10 (74 characters in total now), but its new pages still show "Character name not found" where the stats should be. So this table comes from the cards as players read them aloud on stream, cross-checked against the developers' teaser posts. The Arsonist is the exception: none of the videos we went through reads its card, so that row is the developers' teaser only.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Blobfish Games / Evil Empire)

On paper, three of these are worth the $3.99 by themselves. The Archaeologist trades half your enemy materials for four crates a wave; Cephalopocalypse said "this character seems really powerful" while reading the card, and the developers' own pitch is "get stronger with every crate." The Survivor removes the weakest part of a late Brotato shop, the weapons you don't want. And the Mad Scientist looks to us like the payoff of the developers' own teaser (our reading; they haven't said so): Droid for Mecha, Variant for Mutant, "and together? Both of both worlds!"

The Droid is the one we'd approach carefully. Every level-up raises enemy damage by 5% with no stat choice in return, and your health bar is your wallet.

GODEEPER: For another cheap survivors-like add-on with a long character list, see what poncle shipped in Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Bloodmoon →

Bugs, mods and patch 1.2.0.1

The launch had the usual first-week problems, and one that hasn't been patched yet. The Survivor drew the most attention: the developers' patch notes single it out ("talking about you Survivor"), though only two of the 13 changes involve it. Patch 1.2.0.1 fixed a co-op crash when several players took crate rewards at once as the Survivor, stopped Mutation from copying the Survivor's "No weapon in the shop" effect, and capped the baby T-rex at 95% of your max speed. The rest of the list fixes the co-op shop layout, the wave 19 shop buttons, the Brachiosaurus Codex entry, two title-screen logos and a few translations.

Two reports are still open as far as we can tell. One reviewer hit a crash every time they hovered over weapons as the Survivor in the level-up menu; the patch notes don't mention it. A four-player couch co-op group reported crashes at the mutation screen about four hours after 1.2.0.1 went live.

Mods are the other trap. The update changed enough that the developers ask everyone to "deactivate all your mods before playing," because outdated ones can conflict.

The DLC achievements sit in their own set instead of the base game's list, using Steam's new achievement sets. A developer reply on Steam notes the feature "is still in beta," so if a Primal Dread achievement doesn't show where you expect, that's probably Steam. Dave the Diver's jungle pack uses the same kind of separate set, and our Dave the Diver Jungle DLC achievements guide shows where it appears.

Who should buy it now, and who should wait

Steam prices below were read in the US store at 20:43 UTC on November 3, 2026.

• You own Brotato and play for variety: buy it. $3.99 for 10 characters, a map and a new stat is a fair price. Wasting, who unlocked every new character in one four-hour stream, called it "a really nice one and fair price." A positive Steam review from November 2 calls it one more addition well worth having.
• You play for Nightmare wins: buy it and decide per run, or wait for the balance patch. The developers have promised balancing. Until then, Item Set lets you play without it, at the cost of the new characters.
• You don't own Brotato yet: start with the base game. It's $2.49 on Steam until 10 a.m. Pacific on November 16. Miss that and the next storewide sale on Valve's schedule is the Winter Sale, December 17 to January 4 (our Steam sale calendar has every date). If you want everything, the three-pack bundle (Brotato, Abyssal Terrors, Primal Dread) is $8.70 right now, cheaper than the $9.67 for buying the three on sale separately. Eneba's Global Steam key for the base game was $4.13 on its product page when we checked at 20:43 UTC on November 3: more than Steam's sale price until November 16, less than the $4.99 list price after it ends.
• You play local co-op: wait for the next patch. One crash fix landed; the mutation-screen crash report came after it. Until then, our best co-op games list and Risk of Rain 2 multiplayer guide cover groups that want a run-based game tonight.

If Evolution sounds like too much chaos, the other roguelites we've covered this year make a cleaner fit: Skull Horde is an auto-battler with skeleton armies, Slayblade is about merging parts, and our Wanderburg review tells anyone after Brotato-level build depth to wait for its Q1 2027 update. Fans of poncle's other games should look at Vampire Crawlers, and if you'd rather spend the money on a bigger roguelite DLC, our Risk of Rain 2 Hallowed Concepts coverage and item tier list are the place to start.

For a wider shortlist, our best roguelike games of 2026 under $20 includes an autobattler pick, and the indie roguelites from the Summer Sale list carries an October 28 price snapshot.

Our take

We'd buy Primal Dread. Ten characters and a new stat for $3.99 is the same deal Abyssal Terrors was, and the Mixed label is mostly a language split that Abyssal Terrors had too. What we wouldn't do is judge Brotato's difficulty by it this week: Evolution currently hands out enough free stats that a 1,000-hour player called Nightmare "hard to lose." That's a tuning problem with a fix already promised, not a broken DLC. Check back after the first balance patch before you chase a Danger 5 win with it on.

How we checked

We haven't played Primal Dread. On November 3 and 4, 2026 (Vietnam time) we read the Steam store pages for Primal Dread, Abyssal Terrors and Brotato, the developers' four Steam posts about the DLC (October 8, October 30, the November 2 launch post with Update 1.2, and patch 1.2.0.1) and their countdown posts on r/brotato. Review totals per language come from Steam's review summaries at 20:42 UTC on November 3; the daily split comes from Steam's review histogram, read at the same time. Character kits come from the in-game cards as read aloud by Cephalopocalypse, Rogue Syrma and Wasting in their launch-week videos, checked against the developers' teasers; the Arsonist's card wasn't read in any of them. The Brotato wiki's new character pages had no stats yet, so we didn't use them for numbers. The Eneba price is from Eneba's product page for the Global Steam key, read from a North American connection at 20:43 UTC on November 3, when we also checked Steam's news feed again: no patch after 1.2.0.1.

References

1. Brotato: Primal Dread on Steam, Steam
2. Brotato on Steam, Steam
3. Brotato: Abyssal Terrors on Steam, Steam
4. Brotato Primal Dread DLC, Out Now!, Blobfish Games / Evil Empire on Steam
5. Update 1.2, Blobfish Games / Evil Empire on Steam
6. Patch v1.2.0.1, Blobfish Games / Evil Empire on Steam
7. Primal Dread DLC coming on November 2nd, Blobfish Games / Evil Empire on Steam
8. Brotato: Primal Dread Release Time, Blobfish Games / Evil Empire on Steam
9. Characters, Brotato Wiki
10. The New Expansion is SO COOL: Brotato Primal Dread, Archaeologist, Cephalopocalypse on YouTube
11. Brotato: Primal Dread DLC Launch Trailer, Evil Empire on YouTube