Games
Design your own mega soup factory for the hungry souls.
PixelJunk ™ Nom Nom Galaxy takes corporate capitalism and presents it in what seems comical, but it belies a verisimilitude of ruthlessness through the foolhardy manner it operates in. There lies the fun of it, with your fledgling corporation taking on faceless behemoths who’ve already cornered the market; but the cravings for more soupy goodness is insatiable for this intergalactic alien consumer base. You stand a chance by bringing them new flavours and creating a new market in the same space that’s your own. Of course, there will be retaliatory action. You’re eating into the profits of these united magnates, their white collar yuppies and other fat cats involved who are not happy with the fact that you threaten their indolent lifestyles. Base building, resource mining and anti-sabotage systems to keep production smooth will be tantamount to victory.
Q-Games, under the captainship of Dylan Cuthbert, is a team of Europeans working from Japan, closely associated with Sony and Nintendo even before they formed the company. They’re known for using each game like any artist should – void of bias, unaware of what came before it, and just doing dummy runs for whatever seems as the next emergent by the way of a project. The PixelJunk series is absolutely that, with every single game title that comes out under it, exploring some part of a game genre that they’ve so far left untouched. This one blends the sandbox game with a strategy platformer, giving you no objectives, but all the tools to make some out for yourself. There is a concept rolling here, but that’s about it. You take care of the rest!
So, industrial management is the name of the game. The creation, distribution, and packaging of lip-smacking soups is your goal. And keeping your clientele gratified while making sure new planets are appetised for the same, your success. The environment is fully editable, much like Terraria, so anything can be placed anywhere, and anything can be reshaped into something else. The entire landscape is modifiable, so every factory in the same place can work in a unique manner, one that’s completely different from any other. The tower defence like elements have been explained as well, because there will be constant attacks once the facility becomes large enough to sustain production for extended periods of time. You’ll have your robots handling that, and your turrets taking the enemy out. Every now and then, they’ll break through, your sentry defence will fail, so you’ll have to get your own hands dirty, giving you fighter/shooter elements too. And in every planet you’ll manage to find at least one firearm that helps you take care of the business. Finally, you have the precise nature of the platformer, with your characters jumping, doing double-takes and just moving about in that manner. The game is a broth of its own! We’re skipping the management aspects of the game, feel free to surprise yourself with those.
While the base-building for this game is extremely fun, and the different modes that you have at your disposal only make you spend more time on it, the action sequences seem trite to say the least. A little more effort would have made it fantastic. Still, nothing more than a minor quip, considering the campaign mode keeps you engrossed. Difficulty and complexity are the most essential ingredients of any platformer: more recipes, better spices, and a significant amping up of what tools keep coming into use. The free mode allows you to build a base that could be anything you like, without even the limited restrictions that are in place otherwise for the purposes of meeting objectives. There is an online co-op and splitscreen, giving you even more time to explore the worlds here.
Early access for a year, it’s now out on PC. Anyone can take their shot, make some stock and see what it feels like. It feels good, very satisfying. Take our word for it.
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