Nom Nom Galaxy is a fairly simple game that can be fun and strangely addicting. Handled by Q-Games, Nom Nom Galaxy has the player take on the role of an Astroworker of Soup Co. tasked with a very simple task – making soup.

Of course, this task entails much more than that after you’re dropped onto a planet’s surface. You need to dig, find resources, make sure you have a good supply of oxygen, build a reliable factory, find a steady supply of ingredients, make the soup, send the soup into space with a soup rocket, and defend your base from your competitors.

The game’s premise is for you to corner and eventually monopolize the market. Throughout the time you spend sending off soup from a given planet you’ll gain market shares, and these market shares are what you’ll be fighting other companies for as you struggle to own the market. Each soup that is sent up on a rocket will boost your shares, with some soups earning more.

There are two main aspects to the game that the player will be dealing with as they produce soup. First is factory management, which comes in two parts – construction and management. As you explore the land for ingredients, you’ll be earning resources that will be used to build your factory. There are a large number of part and corridor options to build up or out, and plenty of soup machines and soup rockets to send your soups off to the ends of the universe.

In addition to the building itself, you’ll also find yourself wanting to manage what goes on in the factory by hiring robots to help you out and automate as much of the process as possible. Some of these little helpers will carry ingredients and cans of soup back and forth. Some robots will throw things side to side, or up and down. Others still can farm for you and such, all of which help streamline the process of making the soups – which we’ll cover soon.

The process of building and maintaining the soup factory is fun if you like those types of games. If base building isn’t your thing, beware, you’ll be doing a lot of it here, and the better you are at it, the easier the game becomes. While you won’t have access to all the possible robot helpers from the get go, the more you unlock, the easier it is to automate the whole process and become and overseer, rather than a direct worker.

Part of the building process also entails setting up defenses for invasions. As you make your way up to the top of the soup producing world, your enemies will start sending their minions out to attack your factory and try to destroy your hard work. Putting defenses like turrets in place will help defend the building from attackers, although you’ll likely need to fend off a good portion of them with your own hands usually. These invasions usually occur later in the game, when your competition is desperate to hinder your success.

The second part of the game is procuring soup ingredients, which also comes in two parts – exploration and harvesting. Truthfully, most of the time you’ll spend playing the game will be exploring. From the beginning, you’re given a buzzsaw that can destroy most blocks of earth to allow you to go exploring for various ingredients.

As you explore, you’re generally keeping an eye out for three things; growing plant ingredients, monsters, and oxygen. Oxygen could be argued to be the most important, as you’ll die without it, leaving a ton of your money and building resources behind where you died. However, plants and monsters are your ingredients for soup that will be your main objective in exploration.

Each planet is designed to be different, with different plants and monsters available for you, as well as varying landscapes (For example, one of the early planets is designed with giant trees, whose roots underground are not destructible).

Plants and monsters can both be used as soup ingredients. Each soup machine you add to your factory is dedicated to whatever type of soup is first produced in it, which is made from two ingredients. This means that once you put the first two ingredients in the machine, that one is locked into making soup of that type. Each time you add one of each ingredient into the machine, it will produce one can of soup to be sent out. This means that you’ll constantly be looking to refill your stock of ingredients, and you’ll need to find ways to continually have access to the same ingredients. This can be done in different ways for both plants and monsters.

Plants grow over time, and the larger they are, the more of the plant you can harvest. You could find a large plant, that when broken down may produce 3 pieces of itself. Now, you could use all three as ingredients, but you also have the option of planting one of them and letting it grow. Plants also grow much faster in an area of oxygen. It was surprisingly fun to deal with this part of the game, as it was like a mini farm simulator or something akin to the Harvest Moon series. This became even more ideal to do as I got access to the farming robots.

On the other hand, monsters are spawned by monster colonies. These will produce the same monster over and over, and will not move from day to day like some randomized plants will. They can be destroyed, but if you find a monster colony next to your factory, it’s better to make use of them as ingredients.

Many ingredients, or specific ingredient combinations offer a higher profit to the player, so it’s best to keep an eye out for ingredients you know as valuable and useful to you. Learning the way around the available ingredients will give the player a distinct edge if they know how to manipulate what is available to them.

In addition to a fairly lengthy single-player experience, Nom Nom Galaxy offers multiplayer as well. You can grab a friend and play two-player co-op on the same system, or get 4 people together online to play together. Co-op is certainly a blast, and makes the game more enjoyable – but when is playing with friends not?

There is also a non-cooperative online mode, but whether the game’s code is wonky or the community just isn’t there, it’s very difficult to find a match on the PS4 (Editor’s note: the platform we reviewed the game on). And while the competitive mode is fun, you don’t directly get involved with your opponent enough for it to actually feel that much different from single player.

Nom Nom Galaxy is a great game for its price ($9.99). It will entertain you long after most smaller titles like it would lose their luster, and is great fun to play with a friend. The throwback pixelated style is great, since it utilizes the style without actually losing round edges, and looks great. The colors are pleasing, and helps pick out important things in the landscape when exploring.

All-in-all, I would say that Nom Nom Galaxy is a definite purchase for anyone looking for a fun, cheap game. It’s easily on the higher end of $10 games, and will keep you busy for hours. And, the gameplay is surprisingly addicting.

Nom Nom Galaxy was reviewed on PS4 using a code provided by Q-Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here.