The element of experimentation is definitely one of Nom Nom Galaxy's strong points. Not only is each ingredient a new kind of soup to make, but the combinations turn exponential with each new discovery. The worlds you work on are usually pretty small but contain a lot of surprises in the form of new foes, new plants, and new robot pals, encouraging you to strike out and find what you can find whenever there's a free moment.
Speaking of free moments, co-op is practically necessary to get the most out of Nom Nom Galaxy. Because the pacing is so slow, going it solo can feel a bit plodding, even if you're soup-driven from day one. Add another player or two and suddenly the work is split, allowing people to focus on the things they like doing best. Enjoy tweaking your factory base for maximum soup distribution? Stay at home and work on that. Rather be out exploring for brave new ingredients? Tell your buddies you'll be back in a few days.
Getting a co-op game going is a breeze as well. Both local and online play are supported, and you can turn your world into a cooperative one at any time. Just pop open the menu, go online, and you're gold. Local players can join in arcade-style at the press of a button. The game really does feel like it was built for multiple players, so much so that single player mode feels a bit lacking by comparison.
Nom Nom Galaxy sits in this strange area between simulation and sandbox game. Certain conventions from each genre have been kept or omitted, and the result feels a bit awkward for the first few hours of play. Fall damage, for example, would be a logical inclusion in a sidescrolling game. Here, though, it slows things down in what is already a slow-paced game. You're supposed to build ladders to reach new places, but sometimes it just feels more natural to jump and dive, you know?
Another thing you'll have to get used to are block physics. You know how in Terraria, Minecraft, and every other sandbox game out there, blocks magically float in the sky? If you knock out the ground level of a mountain, the rest of it stays in place just fine. That's not the case in Nom Nom Galaxy, and boy did it take me awhile to remember that. It's easy to prop things up, there's even a special support structure made specifically for that. But until you get that through your thick, soupy skull, expect a lot of base corridors to fall on your head.
I started off treating Nom Nom Galaxy as Terraria with soup rockets, but by the end I treated it like a soup selling game and left the exploration to Marco Polo. This, it seems, is the key to getting the most out of this unusual but supremely entertaining game. Grab some friends and keep an eye on the latest soup trends, you've got a lot of mixing, farming, and fighting to do.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Up to four players join forces to defend, create and produce soup from a user-made factory.
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.