Is this a bit of a fixer-upper?

Come on down to Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop, for all your roguelite spaceship repair simulation needs! WARNING: Untested genre not suitable for people with tentacles for arms or an aversion to dying horrifically. Side effects include improved reading comprehension under pressure and a furry fetish.

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is absolutely insane. It’s a roguelite where you make repairs and die if you don’t earn enough cash to appease your boss. The repairs are far from straight forward with most taking multiple steps and requiring certain tools to fix, all of which you’ll learn from the game’s version of a manual for each particular job. It starts out fairly complicated, but then descends into madness…

And I mean that in a good way. You’ll start out with fairly simple jobs but will go on to bizarre ones and for very odd customers, as well as higher-ups. It almost has a Cult of the Lamb feel about it in some ways, while being even more crazy in its setup. Upgrading your work station will make certain jobs easier on further runs, but you need to find the right balance between paying the R.E.N.T and upgrading or your run will be a short one.

There’s also plenty of hidden puzzles, lore and more to discover. It has a good sense of humour as well, even the tutorial had me laughing as you jettison a dead body of a former coworker, the current one has a deadpan moment of literally saying something along the lines of “screw that guy”, so you’ll know straight away what ride you are in for.

The controls for the tasks do take some getting used to, but will become second nature after a few tries. It did have a few glitchy moments when I first started playing it like menu options getting stuck on the screen or not being able to back out of the manual, but these seem fixed now. The visuals have a nice animated style to it, while having a decent soundtrack to back it up. Framerate is solid and the load times are short.

The Verdict

Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop makes manual labour enjoyable with this roguelite madness of a game. Definitely well worth your time.

Score: 8.5

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co