Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop

Genre: Simulation / Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, combines Puzzle and Simulation gameplay with some Roguelike elements in a game where players take the role of a new employee at an intergalactic spaceship repair station working on refueling and repairing various spaceships.

This game does have more going on under the hood (ha) with a story involving corporate exploitation of workers, various aliens and their conflicts that you largely just see the fringes of, and what seems like the Grim Reaper involving himself in your struggles, and all of this with a mute main character who looks like an anthropomorphic four-eyed fox creature.

Suffice it to say, this game has plenty of personality, and that continues to hold true in the game’s art style, which uses stylized cartoony 2D characters with fluid animation, with some delightfully silly elements like the dopey way your arms waggle around as you run. This is joined by some 3D elements with a similar cartoony style as you work on internal components of the game’s spaceships.

The main gameplay here involves looking through various spacecraft and trying to figure out what’s wrong with them and how to fix them using an instruction manual that’s not always entirely clear. A part of this game’s fun comes from trying to figure out what you’re looking at, how it corresponds to the book, and exactly what the book is trying to tell you to do to resolve the issue.

The game lets players tackle these challenges one of two ways – you can play in “Frantic Fixing” mode, where there’s constantly a ticking clock but you’re not judged so harshly on the quality of your work and you can take on as many jobs as you can fit into your schedule, or “Focused Fixing” mode where you can take as much time as you want on each job, but can only do three jobs a day and everything comes down to your quality of work.

While I enjoyed discovering each new oddity and system type, and figuring out how these contraptions work, to some extent there’s a process and repetition here as you go through the motions of doing what’s needed to fix each thing, and once you’ve fixed a specific problem, then every time that problem comes up again it starts to feel less like a fun puzzle and more like just… well, work.

For what it’s worth, I still liked Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, and I think this game has some really unique gameplay with some good gameplay options. However, I also think that the longer you play it, the more it feels like tedious (or nerve-wracking, depending on the gameplay mode) busywork.

tl;dr – Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop combines Puzzle and Simulation gameplay with some Roguelike elements in a game where players take the role of a new employee at an intergalactic spaceship repair station. The basic gameplay of trying to figure out odd ship systems and decide how to fix them using an instruction manual is clever and fun, but the more you do it, the more it feels like busywork. Still, this game is unique enough that I think it’s worth a look.

Grade: B-

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