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Developer: Gungrounds | Publisher: Mad Head Games || Overall: 8.0/10

I’ve always been a bit soft on bullet hell shmup games. I mostly get frustrated at how cheap some of the elements can be and well, just the ridiculous amount of <curse in Xartraxian> flying around never screamed “fun!” to me. Rocking Pilot is a top-down twin-stick shooter that nestles right in with others in the genre. The titular character is a sarcastic romp through a futuristic war story that has the appropriate amount of tongue-in-cheek and rockin’ tunes keeps the pace up, the adrenaline flowing, and the decibels rising!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEAHHHHH!!!!!

Rocking Pilot is a pretty simple concept. You shoot stuff and stuff blows up. However, the unique feature is using your helicopter’s propellers as a weapon as well. You can consider it a “melee attack,” going right up to the enemy, mowing them down, or enabling Overdrive, which makes you temporarily invincible and empowered to kill and deflect everything. Besides that, using Overdrive tactically is a necessity, otherwise you die, so you cant really use it on cooldown. Many enemies also require you to use Overdrive to kill them, so having a limited amount of Overdrive charge becomes an important resource to manage.

Game progression is interesting, taking its cue from mobile game trends. There are four worlds to unlock, each with about 10 levels. When defeating a level, you’ll earn an assortment of awards, each independent classification (such as “Keys,” “Crowns,” and “Skulls”) unlocking their own string of levels and/or weapons. Eventually, unlocking all of the weapons available makes your helicopter the most badass helicopter in all of history and all of the upgrades work in tandem. Power-ups will show up on the board and you’ll temporarily use one of your unlocked weapons; there isn’t much agency here to “choose” which weapons you want to use, but you take what you can get and use it all up.

There’s not much more to the game, but there’s a lot of gameplay to be had. I had spent about two hours and beat the main storyline, but there were still quite a few levels left to unlock, and most of the upgrades had yet to be discovered. Once you acquire upgrades it’s well worth going back and trying previous levels you left uncompleted to see if you can earn even more upgrades. The upgrades definitely make things easier for you and also keep things fresher. The Score Attack mode available seems to be based on leaderboards, and challenge you to get higher on the board before awarding you, which can be quite an ask. You can also restart your progress by deleting save data, so if you pine for the half hour where you only had a minigun, no missiles or shotguns and <curse in Xartraxian>, then it’s there for you. Also, since you die a lot, having to wait a few seconds and physically confirm two times between each retry can get a bit tiresome, and breaks up the fast-paced feel the game tries hard to sustain.

The art is not too bad; it starts out generic at first then gets a little bit more wacky. Eventually you start fighting aliens and that’s when the art begins to please. There are some talking-head characters which are very nicely drawn, but this creative look doesn’t seem to carryover at all into the actual game for some reason. The helicopter is also just some generic-looking helicopter, but maybe that’s the point there. The sound is also very important in creating the experience of fast-paced craziness.

Rocking Pilot is mostly a challenge waiting to be had. Once you get through the main story, you’ll have to go back and clean up what you didn’t do the first time around, and then some. There isn’t anything in the way of a “free play” mode other than the Score Attacks, but those aren’t available on every mission anyway. You’ll be heading into each mission with particular objectives in mind, most of them fairly unique. The price tag is also very reasonable and if you are looking for a simpler, contemporary shmup, Rocking Pilot might be your <curse in Xartraxian>.

Rocking Pilot is available on Steam.

Developer: Q-Games/Double Eleven | Publisher: Q-Games || Overall: 9.0/10

Walk the aisles of your normal, ideal, grocery store. Rows full of food line the aisles begging for your grubby little hands to take them and put them in your shopping cart. But does any food really speak to your soul as well as soup? Canned soup is one of the most important pieces of human culture, after all.

…Yet have you ever really thought about where your soup comes from?

Do you perhaps think that the planet of Alteria in the galaxy of Soupcon Valley would produce your favorite can of Green Sun Chowder made from Sunblossom and Greenstalk? Or do you think the civil war and strife of the robots on Nozesi fuel the good time tastes of the delightful Split Sea Soup and/or Filet of Fission?

PixelJunk: Nom Nom Galaxy makes you ask these questions and more. Well, actually none of that matters because the name of the game is business and market share. The real test comes in beating your enemy’s robot workers into eternal jobless poverty by creating an efficient soup factory that satisfies the needs of the universe.

Getting down to the essential basics of the game, the robots need soup and you are making the soup, delivering it to the hungry patrons via rockets. Finding material that is usable for cooking across sprawling sandboxes, you are equipped with your buzzsaw which cuts through and helps you gather many of the things you’ll need. You’ll also be punching a lot of things. On the factory production side, you’ll have to maintain, defend, and build out a soup factory that is as efficient as possible. Robot workers can be hired to assist you in this pursuit, and their operation is a small callback to the logic of Lemmings. What this ends up being is an interesting mix of game genres in a sci-fi setting with some sparse story to set up the scenarios each planet presents.

What I mostly enjoyed about Nom Nom Galaxy is that it is a sandbox game with a clear objective at hand. As far as the sandbox genre goes, Starbound is the only other game I’ve played with any large amount of time, which is built mostly on a free-form playstyle that centers on improving your crafting and character’s gear. Nom Nom Galaxy distinguishes itself from this by giving you developer-designed planets full of ingredients to exploit to the best of your ability, earning upgrades after beating a planet. The factory’s efficiency becomes a main focus of the gameplay as a result — which can be detrimental to the exploration aspect the game provides, as it essentially becomes the opposite of business efficiency.

As you make your way through the planets, each will provide an upgrade or new thing to buy to change up the gameplay a bit. Eventually you hit a point, about midway through the game, where scenarios start to take place and you’re no longer able to use defense towers, robot workers, or other things you’ve grown accustom to using. As the existing system can be a bit complex to learn and understand the controls/logic of the game, the pace is set about right. Enhancements such as, and being able to use, a double jump or a rocket boost changes the way you play entirely.

Ingredients are varied and many have specialties about them. There’s about 20 unique ingredients which can be combined with each other, resulting in 400 recipes. Some ingredients are special and take a long time to find/grow, some you have to kill mobs for, and others are common and plantable. It’s always fun to find something new in the game and seeing what will result when you combine two different ingredients can be satisfying.

When you combine ingredients, a Soup Can pops out of the Soup Machine. You take the Soup Can into the Soup Rocket, and the rocket delivers the payload which affects your market share by a base of 5%. Depending on the market trends that pop up every now and then, the game influences you to try and find different ingredients, or stop using one that might be a commonly used on in all of your Soup Machines, forcing you to change your focus.

A good 20 hours or so of gameplay got me within range of the last three stages of the “Conquest” mode. Unfortunately Nom Nom Galaxy didn’t live up to the same perfection in its difficulty as PixelJunks Monsters did, and I had a relatively easy time getting through it as I mastered the game’s logic. Half of the levels in the Conquest Mode are used to introduce you to the gameplay itself, and the latter half tests you to master it to only some unique challenge. Each planet introduced something new, but the core gameplay being so complex brings down the experience a bit, I fear. We spend too much time “learning how to play” that when we finally get around to unlocking everything substantial and playing “for realisies” you only have a couple of planets left and the last level of the game, which will require you to use everything at your disposal.

Each planet has the option for endless play, only after you attain 100% market share. You are also able to continue building your factory as it was or start from scratch in this “S.O.O.P Simulator” mode. While the planets will always be the same, they offer enough variety and quantity to not have to worry too much about that. Though since there is no meta game, you are working on each planet on an individual basis. There is also a mode called Galactic Challenges which take a unique approach to the games formula and pretty much anything seems to go here. You could be racing from point A to point B or trying to sell as much soup in 10 minutes as you can. Challenges expire after about 36 hours, and you compete against all other players here, either at the same time, or asynchronously via global rankings. You can also “Quick Join” and matchmake with another player, however the capability did not seem to be enabled in the review build before release. I assume there could be some sort of generation for planets in this mode but I can’t be sure.

A lot of the aspects of the baked-in challenge actually disincentivizes you from exploring. You’ll be dealing with maintaining the workflow of the factory, depending on its need to rely on you to acquire/scout for ingredients. You are also equipped with an Oxygen tank which limits the distance you can go without finding a source of oxygen or heading back to base. You’ll also be called back to base when your rival sends monsters to disrupt and destroy your base. You can automate the defenses a bit by loading it with laser guns and missiles, but you’ll still need to make sure you are there to pick up any of the stragglers and repair buildings. If at any point your Office is destroyed, you automatically lose the game.

At the end of each day, the game pauses for “Break Time” and saves your current progress. During Break Time you’ll be shown informative stats, graphs, and how much money you earned. An added layer of planning is involved as any ingredients that are not currently inside Soup Machines or planted will disappear. When planting items, it will expand your potential to increase your output substantially, but only if you plan correctly. Personally I felt like it made the game a lot easier to have the capability to grow your own ingredients since you could plant a lot of the same common ingredients over and over in each level and usually the AI competitor would not match very well in a challenge as long as you had a good production going. Progression to new zones is limited by recipes you discover, so there is an incentive to experiment, but not much since it was easy to meet those expectations and I never really had to replay anything unless I fucked up severely or neglected my base on purpose.

Sound and visuals is also another high point. There is a lot of insanity going on initially. It will take a while for you to understand what is going on, but the art is fantastic and intricate. The robots are uniquely designed and I loved discovering something new, or going to the next planet to see the theme. Sound is also well done for the most part, but there was a surprising lack of music. PixelJunk Monsters and PixelJunk Eden had great soundtracks, but Nom Nom Galaxy seems to take its cues from PixelJunk Shooter with a minimalist approach to music and sound, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just different. Monsters is probably one of my favorite soundtracks ever, so it was a bit disappointing to not have another great soundtrack to listen to.

As a big fan of the PixelJunk series I was completely satisfied with this entry. While it breaks the mold of “simplicity” all of the other games established within their own genres, Nom Nom Galaxy files down several different genres into core tenants that work together in an interesting fashion. The game is very ambitious and I enjoyed the humor quite a bit. Replayability might be Nom Nom Galaxy’s biggest fault, but there is certainly plenty to do and you can keep doing it for pretty much as long as you like. There just becomes a point where you kind of “get it” and in this case I don’t see myself coming back to visit it very often like I do with PixelJunk Monsters. It is, however, a lot easier to play the game for very long sessions.