Fix Ships Or Die Trying
HIGH Charming art style and characters.
LOW Clunky controls make complicated repairs impossible to complete quickly.
WTF Why do random customers keep deciding to kill me?
With the amount of roguelikes I’ve played this year, I often wonder if developers will ever run out of content to push into procedurally-generated problems.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop proves once again that limit is nowhere close to being reached as it dares to ask the question — what if we turned a simple mechanic’s job into a life-or-death scenario?
The player starts out as Wilbur, a fox/human hybrid forced into a job at Uncle Chop’s, a repair center for spaceships of all kinds, as well as being a pit stop for priests, criminals, and everyday people passing through the galaxy. It’s an incredibly detailed hub full of witty characters drawn in a simple, yet expressive 2D style.
However, life at Chop’s isn’t an intergalactic easy street. Wilbur’s life is a life of servitude — the player must fix ships in less than ~8 realtime minutes, with each ship presenting a different problem for players to solve.
This problem-solving is the crux of the moment-to-moment gameplay of Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop. Wake up, solve puzzles to repair ships, earn money, pay Wilbur’s R.E.N.T. payments, or else face bankruptcy and death. Yet every time Wilbur fails, he’s thrust right back into the fray like nothing ever happened, called back from the afterlife by some cruel capitalist god.
Each day in Uncle Chop’s, the boss gives Wilbur a set of tasks to complete for the ships that dock at the repair shop. He start out with simple jobs like refueling a ship’s fuel tanks, adjusting oil levels, and replacing missing parts. The gameplay for each job is hands-on — the player must unscrew every bolt, manually adjust sliders and switches, and replace missing or malfunctioning parts by themselves. It’s fairly forgiving the first few times, but the skill floor soon rises to an entirely new level because once Wilbur starts projects that are outside of the typical refueling and replacing fuel cells, it’s almost impossible to get them done on the first try.
Puzzling work orders like fixing a ship’s virtual reality port, changing a rebreather module by creating breathable gas on a miniature planet, or coddling a ship’s AI companion to make it feel better offer an ever-increasing level of challenge.
Don’t get me wrong, these are interesting puzzles to solve, but it becomes more stressful than enjoyable after a certain point because every task Wilbur is forced to complete requires a deep understanding of how every single ship’s system works.
Thankfully, there’s a manual, but using it is extremely unwieldy, with the player having to read the information and fix the problem on the fly because Wilbur can’t stop doing a job once he’s started, otherwise he’ll lose precious money that could be going towards his rent payments. Even for jobs that I thought I’d memorized, every panel left open or errant part left astray would mean pay docked from my overall compensation.
All of these factors combined mean that every time I was presented with a brand new problem that I was unfamiliar with, I would either spend all of my time trying to figure it out and losing other income opportunities or fail it instantly and be set so far back that I wouldn’t be able to make my next rent payment.
Of course, once I figured out the refueling, oil, and rebreather modules, I’d challenge myself to complete these jobs as fast as possible. It takes a while, but eventually overcame them, but let’s not forget that Uncle Chop‘s also offers a roguelike structure that is incredibly repetitive. I’m aware that roguelikes are repetitive by nature, but Uncle Chop’s is a different beast.
When the player begins a ‘run’ in Uncle Chop’s, most things remains the same — on every second day of a run, a ship crashes into the repair zone, and Wilbur has to begin putting out the fire and changing the oil. Every third day starts with a job that requires the same four modules to fix and takes nearly the whole day to complete. Every fourth day, a meteor shower starts raining debris on the workstation, and so on.
It’s the same exact cycle, over and over and over again. This repetitiveness combined with the time limits, certain missions with finicky controls, and a random chance for customers to hold Wilbur up for money at gunpoint and then kill him if you answer their questions incorrectly (yes, he can get shot by customers!) makes for an incredibly frustrating experience. In the nearly 10 hours I played, I only made it to the first boss once and was flummoxed on how to beat it.
Maybe it’s a slow burn and I need more time with it, but Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is so unrelenting in its first act, it left me hanging my head in defeat. It’s a title with a lot of potential, but ultimately, the punishing, repetitive foundation it sits on isn’t enough for me to support continued playthroughs.
Rating: 6 out of 10
— Jack Dunn
Disclosures: This game is developed by Beard Envy and published by Kasedo Games. It is currently available on PC, Switch, XBX/S, and PS5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 8 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood, Strong Language, and Violence. This is not a game for kids. The NPCs in this game use curse words a fair amount, and those NPCs can also kill the protagonist with guns and blades if a job isn’t completed correctly or their rent payments aren’t made on time, often with lots of blood involved.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Dear & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They cannot be resized. The game offers full subtitle support, but some puzzles require audio cues, like a reactor puzzle that starts beeping faster and faster the closer it gets to blowing up. This game is not fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.
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You should have started off with “Focused” mode instead of “Frantic” mode so you didn’t have a time limit.
That’s kinda on you, boss.