Nom Nom Galaxy Review (PC)

The Steam library entry for Nom Nom Galaxy does not say anything about an association with the Pixel Junk series for which the development team at Q-Games is best known, but the actual name of the game application proudly displays it.

The new title from the veteran developers manages to take some concepts that no other studio would put together, mainly soup production, exploration and tower defense, and mashes them up together into an interesting experience that will challenge and delight a lot of their fans.

Nom Nom Galaxy is, in some ways, a critique of capitalism and the exploitation it often fosters, but the game also manages to deliver plenty of fun moments.

The competition to create soup and to deliver it to customers becomes the most important thing in the universe and gamers are forced to find new ways to deal with the challenges that Q-Games has implemented.

Story

Nom Nom Galaxy takes gamers to a version of the far future where stylized humanity has managed to explore a lot of alien planets and it seems that the central need for all those spread across space, apart from oxygen, is to get a decent can of soup from one of the factories that seek to dominate the market.

Players start off as a lowly Astroworker for SoupCo and they need to prove their skills on a variety of planets, dealing with the unique situation on each, as they set up complex factories to manufacture the product and find new recipes to impress customers with.

Nom Nom Galaxy going down

The combinations of various ingredients is important because only by getting more of them, which involves exploration and some combat, gamers will unlock the gates that block progress in the single-player campaign, which offers a lot of quite varied missions.

Nom Nom Galaxy gives gamers freedom to choose how they want to play, but it is also structured around the idea that good soup generates market share that leads to victory, something that some fans of previous Q-Games experiences might disapprove of.

Gameplay

Nom Nom Galaxy starts off (for reasons that the narrative never directly addresses) with the player character crashing in his shuttle on a new planet, which offers a convenient way of making sure that he begins with nothing other than his trusty chainsaw.

Using this impressive tool, gamers will have to dig through the landscape to explore and to get access to a variety of resources.

The base building side of Nom Nom Galaxy relies on the material that's hidden in the world, in clusters that need to be discovered and dug out.

“Exploration is impossible without new reserves of oxygen, which is thankfully easily found on most worlds, and gamers also need to locate the ingredients they will need to create the various soup combinations.”

After a little running around, it's time to set up the office and the associated base, with the various factories and the launch pad, which will deliver the product to the hungry aliens waiting for it.

Building is initially very simple, but it's very inefficient to work alone to deliver all the ingredients and then launch the cans, and the game slowly unlocks new tools and robotic companions that can be used to automate the entire process to some extent.

Gamers who want to conquer the single-player campaign in Nom Nom Galaxy will have to create areas where they will grow their own flora (oxygen helps a lot for that) and they will carefully consider the placement of elevators and conveyor belts to make them as efficient as they can be.

Once soup production is up and running and the gamer is getting some solid market share, they will have to also deal with attacks from enemy companies, which means placing turrets around the perimeters and jumping into the fray to take out enemy stranglers.

This side of the video game feels limited and fails to be engaging, mainly because the defensive options are relatively limited, and there's a loose connection between the soup creation and the combat.

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Maybe the competition between the various companies should have been depicted using another set of mechanics, with combat limited to the moments when the fauna of various planets needs to be turned into ingredients.

Nom Nom Galaxy is a deep game because it mixes so many ideas, and the tutorials created by the developers, while informative, fail to show the level of complexity that gamers will have to deal with.

Base building, and especially optimization, is hard to get right and there were moments when my designs were so bad that I started levels from scratch rather than trying to fix them because I was very frustrated with my previous decisions.

The PC version of the game can be played either with a gamepad or with a combination of mouse and keyboard, and the first solution is more elegant and effective at the moment.

Graphics and audio

Nom Nom Galaxy uses the style of the Pixel Junk universe, but there's more attention paid to detail for both the worlds that gamers explore and the main character and his movements.

The blocky design and bright colors make the universe itself feel joyful at every turn, even if making soup basically means exploiting alien flora and fauna, and the competition between companies is vicious and involves the use of violence rather than marketing and advertising.

I also love the music in Nom Nom Galaxy, with its mix of electronic and rock influences, although there are moments when it can feel repetitive despite its obvious quality.

The rest of the sound design is cartoonish and matches the overall feel of the game without impressing in any way.

Multiplayer

Nom Nom Galaxy allows gamers to join others cooperatively in order to solve the various quests, and the power of multiple players is a great way to make even the toughest challenges easier to deal with, especially when at least one of those taking part is a veteran and can coordinate the efforts of the rest.

There are also special missions created by the team at Q-Games, updated every few days, which allow players to compete for Galactic Gum in both standard single-player and in split-screen coop.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion