Fix ships, die repeatedly, and join a donut-making cyber cult in Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop.
In Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop we play as Wilbur, a dog-man hybrid who crash-lands into a space garage to work as a mechanic. Wilbur works under Uncle Chop, the mysterious pig owner of the workshop who demands increasingly higher rent payments, which result in death when not paid.
Wilbur’s job is to learn as much as he can about spaceships and keep customers happy by working fast without making any mistakes, but weird occurrences have a way of sneaking into his daily life, or rather, the sets of three days he’s allowed to live in.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop
Developer: Beard Envy
Publisher: Kasedo Games
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: December 5, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $19.99
Let me preface this entire review by saying that I really like Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop‘s idea and main gameplay loop. Looking at these weird machines until you understand how they work and how to fix each part of them is incredibly fun, and the game has a great tactile feel with its animations and the way everything works.
Even something as simple as cleaning a toilet or fixing headlights is very satisfying, and doing it without having to check the manual provides a great sense of accomplishment. Some of the modules are incredibly creative, like the rebreather, which is a miniature planet inhabited by two snails that need to be taken care of to produce breathable oxygen.
That said, the game does not feel properly balanced at all, and the diminishing returns start to set in once the satisfaction of doing a good job begin to clash with how the game is structured, which we’ll discuss possibly for the rest of this review.
The main part of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is played in cycles of three days, in which you have to take on jobs to be able to pay for your rent. The game has very little tolerance for mistakes, and screwing up a job means you might lose time and money while doing it, so it’s best to become really familiar with the worker’s manual, because one mistake might ruin your current quota.
On the third day is where the game really tests the player, usually featuring a mandatory job that cannot be completed without the proper machinery. The correct way to do things is to buy the two machines usually required, as well as a workshop expansion, since you only have enough space for one of the machines by default.
Needless to say, this is incredibly unintuitive, forcing the player to go bankrupt at the start of the game to buy all of these things, and to add insult to injury, the machines take one day to arrive, so if you reached the third day without this knowledge then it’s simply too late.
One very annoying thing is that if you do try to get ahead of the game and buy the machines on the first day, the game already considers you owning them, even though they haven’t arrived yet. What this does is that it removes the warning on jobs you can’t complete, letting you pick a spaceship that cannot be fixed and killing your current run.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop gives you no breathing room whatsoever during runs, which would be fine if some things weren’t completely out of your hands. The game lets you pick between timed days or job-based days, meaning that you can either race against the clock to complete as many jobs as you want, or tackle three harder jobs every day.
To make things even more difficult, the second and third days of the first cycle have unique mechanics. On the second day, there’s an almost guaranteed chance a ship will crash-land on your workshop, either taking up time or a job slot from you. On the third day, the mandatory job can also be tagged as deadly, ending your run instantly if any mistakes are made.
The deadly jobs are rough and basically disrespect your choice of difficulty mode, because even if you told the game you want to take your time and fix things properly, you can still have timed objectives thrown your way, like the pipe bombs.
The ship with the burning reactor is also a very difficult one to tackle, giving the player roughly four seconds after it lands before blowing up. My experience with it was taking the job, watching the ship land, and almost immediately dying as I was reading my to-do list.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is filled with these types of situations, which feel like they are put in place simply to frustrate. Not only does the player have to deal with the learning curve of each piece of machinery, but also on how to go bankrupt properly to survive the third day, and even then the game can still screw you over.
The best strategy that I could find is to buy the encoder and pancake maker stations on day one, because it allows you to tackle the rebreather and tomfoolery jobs on the second day, which pay better. If everything goes right and you do every job perfectly and get a reasonable mandatory mission on the third day, then you can finally clear the first quota.
As a roguelike, Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is not good. It doesn’t understand what makes the genre fun and puts ultra-difficult objectives in front of the player to enforce repetition. I was roughly 6 hours in before I cleared the first quota and then was met with a boss fight on the next set of days, featuring machines I never saw before and did not have the time to learn.
Playing on timed mode is simply not worth it; not only is the game much harder, but the amount of time that it takes between jobs will lead you to make less money than a job-based run. This mode was not properly thought out and shouldn’t really be attempted unless you want a challenge, despite being presented as a regular difficulty option when starting the game.
Things like the cost of meta upgrades are way too high, and some of them seemingly don’t work. Spending omens, the game’s meta currency, to purchase a shield doesn’t stop ships from crash-landing into your workshop on the second day, and being forced to waste your reroll when the game drops two jobs you can’t complete on the first day is a joke.
If you don’t feel like banging your head against the game’s spaceship-fixing route, then you can try to escape Uncle Chop by joining other factions. One of them can be found after unlocking the speakeasy, letting you join a hivemind that makes donuts to avoid death via failed quota.
This opens up an entirely different game where you are now working at a donut shop, filled with its own unique machines and processes that you have to learn. Unfortunately, this section of the game also has a few bugs and softlocks, so it’s not that much of a respite.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is very lengthy thanks to its high difficulty, to the point where you start doing jobs perfectly because the alternative is death. The game feels brutal to play right now, not only because of the tight quotas and learning curve but also because of the bugs and instant deaths that aren’t always avoidable.
The gameplay portion of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is honestly fantastic, and fixing the machines never really gets old, but the game is so hostile towards any player progress that it feels like a chore to play at points. Meta upgrades are slow to unlock, the player is forced to start at a handicap thanks to the way machine purchases are handled, and timed mode is simply unbalanced.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop will be a great roguelike once it gets balanced properly, but at the moment, any feelings of satisfaction will be quickly replaced by frustration once the monotony of attempting the same objectives over and over starts to set in.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by Kasedo Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is available on Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).
