Welcome to SoupCo. Your mission is to explore to search for tasty ingredients to make the best soups in the entire galaxy to feed our hungry customers, and steal the biggest market share from our competitors, defending our soup factories from enemies who try to destroy what we have built. Are you up to the challenge? If the answer is yes, then read on!

Nom Nom Galaxy is a game from the developers behind the PixelJunk series. The art style and gameplay feel very much like a PixelJunk game, which is definitely not a bad thing. Therefore, the game will appeal the most to the PixelJunk fans (I am one of said fans after having spent many hours playing Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate).

I would describe Nom Nom Galaxy as a world exploring business simulator with platforming and tower defense mechanics. The universe of Nom Nom Galaxy can be explored to your heart’s content, and you can craft hundreds of different soups and collect many different of ingredients. You can also plant crops to create new ingredients for our recipes! You also have robots who will work tirelessly at fetching and processing ingredients thus turning them into awesome soup that they will then store into delivery rockets, which are then sent to our hungry paying customers.

The tutorials are very good and teach you the basics of how to play Nom Nom Galaxy. By the end of tutorial level 2, you can play as you see fit with extra tutorial menu’s popping up every time you approach or do something new. My only gripe is with tutorial level 2 which has a bug that causes the screen to go black, forcing you to quit and restart the level. As far as I am aware this is the only level with said bug.

You can only carry a limited supply of oxygen, and you will die if your oxygen depletes, so there are a some oxygen pockets scattered around each level that look like tiny white dots. Be sure to visit those air pockets at every opportunity to stay alive!

During the levels, you can use your buzzsaw to dig through green blocks to collect blue matter. These are used to to make your factory better and to build ladders to get to hard to reach places. So when you find your first factory, you’ll be able to Open the construction menu and build what you need, as long as you have enough blue matter for it.

The tower defense mechanic kicks in when you have stolen a large chunk of the market share and you are attacked by the competition. During the attack, you have to make sure your weapons are fully loaded, and you can also build more shot towers if you wish. These can track and shoot down your enemies before they can even touch your factory. Once you have got rid of the competition, you will have to make repairs to get your factory up and running again. Always start with the office since without an office your factory is pretty much useless.

The game offers two modes: Corporate Conquest mode which is the main campaign mode, and there is also Galactic Challenges mode, which offers a series of challenges that can be played in single player, asynchronous online co-op and challenge other players. New challenges are generated every few days and you can compete for galactic gum for use in Conquest mode. In the challenges, you aim for the highest score possible within a given time limit and earn medals – from Bronze being the lowest to Elite being the highest. So far, I have only managed a silver medal in most challenges. Can you grab the Elite medal in all challenges? Luckily, you have a few days to practice each set of challenges!

Nom Nom Galaxy has some in-game achievements in the form of Astro Pins. Some of the examples are collect X number of weapons, build X number of soup machines, harvest X number if ingredients, and destroy X number of blocks, to name a few.

The game can be played in both single-player and online co-op. In online co-op, you can join another player on their planet and jointly construct soup factories, discover new recipes and ship them to hungry customers galaxy wide!

I’ve had a great time playing Nom Nom Galaxy. There is plenty to keep players coming back for more for months as long as the devs continue to support the online aspect of the game. I will certainly be playing the challenges for a long time to come!

[review
pros=”Fantastic vibrant PixelJunk graphics.
New challenges every few days.
Great music.” cons=”A bug in tutorial level 2.” score=90]