Review: Nom Nom Galaxy

Here in 2015, after the runaway success of Minecraft and its many imitators, the word ‘crafting’ has almost become a dirty word. See also ‘early access multiplayer survival’ which is technically more a phrase than a word, but I digress. In a market place saturated with games offering players the opportunity to go out compete and cooperate with other players to build increasing impractical architecture, it can feel like there’s nowhere left to go. But PixelJunk’s new title aims to be a little different, while still keeping the core elements of the beloved genre in place. Does it succeed? The answer may soup-rise you!

Like many games in the sandbox genre, Nom Nom Galaxy’s plot is little more than a loose framework on which to hand the gameplay. Nevertheless it’s an interesting tale, set in a space-faring galaxy where the inhabitants prize soup as the pinnacle of cuisine. In order to sate the hunger of all those worlds, various companies battle to create the newest and most delicious soups in order to capture the market share and reign supreme. As an employee of a new start-up soup manufacturer, your task is to explore the various planets Nom Nom Galaxy for delicious ingredients to combine into new flavours. It’s an engaging little story told through slideshow cut scenes and animated newspaper clippings, as your nameless little Astroworker strives to become the greatest soup baron of them all. Indeed the cartoony visuals, adorable character models and the insistence on making mute drones slave away in the bowels of hostile planets to make delicious consumables for a hungry denizens and a callous free market  means that it occupies the middle ground between Mad Max, Ayn Rand and the Clangers. This is certainly no bad thing.

The game-play of Nom Nom Galaxy will be instantly familiar to anyone’s who’s played Terraria or the criminally underrated Steam World: Dig. You dig down through a colourful two dimensional landscape in order to reach materials/treasure/ingredients, which you then bring back to the surface in order to create objects/upgrades/soup respectively. Your character is equipped with a buzz saw to make tunnelling easier, and can mine a vague yet important substance called Matter from the rocks in order to use as building materials. Once you’ve got yourself some ingredients and Matter, then the real meat of the game begins.

You construct different buildings and parts of your impromptu factory on the fly, placing parts wherever you can find room and joining them with corridors and conveyor belts to keep the electricity flowing. Soup is made by placing any two ingredients in a soup machine, and the resulting produce is sent off by soup rockets. Once the rocket reaches the home world, your market share will increase, and then it will return carrying however much money your flavour of soup is worth. Meanwhile your rival will be attempting the same thing, and you conquer each world by producing more soup than your opponent and sending it off to feed your whistling overlords. Simple, easy, and fun. Adventuring across the different planets in search of new or more ingredients gives involves fun little instances of puzzling and platforming, building and shipping soup is a welcome change of pace into satisfying resource management and the periodic counter attacks by rival firms adds an element of tower defence to the whole endeavour. Having these distinct game styles all as part of the same experience and letting you move between them as necessary means that each part rarely gets boring on its own.

I’ve never really  been a fan of any of the genre’s that Nom Nom Galaxy experiments with, but I found myself drawn in and engaged at every stage, and more than willing to battle to the death to defend my soup factory and the delightful little automatons that call it home.

There are also online challenges, in which you can try and compete to have the fastest time, the most soup sold and many other objectives. These will reward you with items for use in the main game, and provide a fun little distraction, but ultimately wear a little thin after a while. I never thought I’d say that there are only so many times you can carry a flaming potato to a cosmic frying pan, but it’s sadly true.

The art style is one of Nom Nom Galaxy’s strongest suits, the bright primary colours and simple polygonal designs of the characters and environments making it stand out from the other games in its field. The designs of the sentient vegetables that form some of the most lucrative, and dangerous, ingredients are adorable and the factories themselves are satisfyingly chunky and robust. Bright colours and a light-hearted aesthetic are always welcome in the increasingly brown-grey world of video games, and the chirpy electronic soundtrack and Saturday morning cartoon visuals make harvesting mushrooms from a subterranean lake seem rather delightful, if it wasn’t for all the carnivorous tomatoes.

Nom Nom Galaxy isn’t without its flaws though. The interface can be awkward and confusing to navigate, and the controls are both slightly off kilter and poorly explained, a combination that inevitably leads to frustration. For example, I was three hours into the game before I discovered that factory parts can be disassembled and moved at will once placed, meaning that I wasted far too much time trying to correct a misaligned girder that should have taken seconds to rectify.

The other issue with time wasted is that the game’s delay in sending and receiving soup rockets can mean that you find yourself losing your 100% market share rating at the last second, and have to play an entire (in game) day all over again just to get back to where you should have been. It’s a relatively minor quibble, but an aggravating one all the same.

In addition, I noticed some glitches while playing the game, the occasional freeze and crash of the game, and a few instances where clicking on a certain menu would cause the entire game to cease working. Most notably was the repeated audio glitch, a clicking sound that happened every time one of the in game tracks came to an end. The game has been in early Access for a whole now, so there’s every chance that it’ll be easily fixed. Playing on PC inevitably involves a certain caveat given the changeable nature of the platform, but even so, there’s nothing that should have caused such a noticeable problem so repeatedly.

The short answer to the question I asked at the start of this review is… mostly. Nom Nom Galaxy is filled with good ideas and you can feel the love that went into crafting its world, but at the same time, the over-complicated nature of some game-play elements and the feeling of slight aimlessness in the game’s various modes may not be to everyone’s taste. Just a little more refinement to the game’s palette could have made for a far more satisfying experience. But nevertheless the end result is a delicious concoction that is sure to be a hit with those who want something to whet their appetite after blasting through the latest Terraria update as well as those who’ve found the genre to be an acquired taste. Food pun.