Chop Chop Inc. Review: Crafting Fun with a Twist

Life in the office world is at best a steady grind towards a paycheck. Go in, process whatever needs processing, go home, repeat until the end of days or the company decides it's time to appease the shareholders with a round of layoffs. Furnox is pretty much exactly like every other office out there, a place where papers get pushed and spreadsheets filled in, all in service of a corporation where the job is to make money and the method of doing so is of secondary consideration. One day Furnox dispenses with a worker who's had one coffee break too many over the course of his employment, yanking his desk up into the ceiling and booting him out the window. This made perfect sense from a bottom-line point of view, but from an unintended consequences perspective, it won't work out so well.

From Corporate Drone to Lumberjack In One Simple Firing

Chop Chop Inc. is a crafting game centered around wood, where as a former Furnox desk-jockey, you're out to grind your ex-employer into dust. Starting off with little more than the clothes on your back, whatever items you managed to swipe from the office and a vein of resentment running miles deep, you'll need to beat down trees and convert them into products that eat into Furnox's market share. Doing it all alone might be a little much, but thankfully there's a handy talkative wooden chest that's more than willing to dole out advice to get you started.

While beating up trees might work in most crafting games, Chop Chop Inc. is clear in the title that it's got no interest in punching. A nearby wooden axe isn't the most dangerous tool available, but it will do to start with, letting you knock down the many birch and apple trees in the starting area. Each tree takes several whacks to fall over, leaving a stump behind that needs a few more chops to remove. The stump provides a single log while the main body of the tree supplies two half-trunks, and both lengths of wood can be refined at the sawhorse into beams or planks. Initially this all goes towards turning the starting area into a functional work zone, but soon enough it's time to begin making and shipping product.

After constructing a workbench, a list of products based on the materials you've unlocked becomes available, although some of them are seriously limited in the number you can make due to needing components that aren't, unfortunately, made of wood. The wooden PC, for example, needs a circuit board from the old laptop left behind by the site's former occupant, and once repurposed the only thing the new computer is good for is ordering items from the nearby town of Wooden Holly. Which requires money. Which you don't actually have much of yet.

This is only a minor speedbump on the way to market domination, though, seeing as there's a small forest of quickly-regrowing trees, a workbench to assemble handcrafted wooden excellence at, and a drone station to ship it all in town. The town will take anything sent its way, but there are also missions available from interested buyers who not only pay full price for their requested goods, but also a nice bonus on top of that. Eventually the buyer missions become the core of the game, long past when all the other elements have run out, but at the start there's a nicely designed little world to explore divided up among multiple biomes with different types of trees in each and more than a few secrets to chase after as well.

The first half of Chop Chop Inc. is by far the best part of the game, when the map is unexplored and there are plenty of projects supplementing the buyer missions. The game's goofy sense of humor is always prominent and keeps coming up with new surprises, such as metal trees that can be forged into ingots, a friendly beaver that crafts all the art pieces you could hope for so long as you keep the wood supply flowing, hidden rubber duckies scattered throughout the landscape and much more. Soon enough you've built a cabin, taking several stages of supplies to get it completed, and even a large workshop filled with a couple of processing stations that kick out the product for you rather than the previous method of hand-assembling each individual item. New areas open up, the crafting recipes get equal parts fancier and sillier, and then you've explored the world, but the game just keeps on going.

The first half of Chop Chop Inc. is by far the best part of the game, when the map is unexplored and there are plenty of projects supplementing the buyer missions.

One of the tabs in Chop Chop Inc. is Progress, and it shows a number of goals you need to work towards. The big one is to take all of Furnox's market share, and by the time you've explored the map, found a duck cult, climbed a mountain and met its resident penguin, explored the various caves, and constructed the quick-travel portals, the market share is at about 35%. By this point I'd gotten my stats mostly topped off, with strength and a thoroughly-upgraded axe meaning trees fall down in a single strike, speed letting me rocket across the level and stamina meaning I rarely needed to slow down, and all that was left was a loooooong list of tasks from people who wanted X number of Y items.

At this point money is just a number that goes up, and the map is a familiar stomping ground with maybe a secret or two left to uncover. The remaining game is "build this for me!", running around to harvest trees again and again and again. Oh, and part of the mission is to deliver the item using a specific method, either the cannon or drone, and if you accidentally use the wrong one it doesn't count.

Closing Comments:

The problem with Chop Chop Inc. is that it starts off strong then runs out of things to do, long before it runs out of goals. When everything works together at the beginning it's a lot of fun. Finding new areas and new resources, crafting new items, unlocking upgrades and learning how best to use them, etc. And then in the back half it forgets all that and turns to all automated crafting all the time. Take a small pile of missions, tally up the needed resources, automate production for what you can and go out to harvest to create the bits you don't, repeat through several gameplay sessions fueled primarily by the fond memories of when the game was enjoyable rather than a list of tasks. Chop Chop Inc. is half of an incredibly entertaining crafting game with a sharp sense of humor and lots of fun secrets to chase after, and it would have been a fantastic experience if hadn't forgotten all that and wound down to tedium.