PixelJunk Nom Nom Galaxy puts you and your friends in charge of an interplanetary soup company. You can build a split-screen factory with one local partner, or join up to three friends online. Each mission drops your crew onto a planet where you dig for ingredients, turn them into recipes, and send cans of soup into space to win market share. Between production runs, the same crew explores underground caverns, fights hostile creatures, and keeps rival companies from wrecking the business.
It is an unusual co-op mix: part platforming and exploration, part factory builder, part light tower defense. There are no character classes or fixed jobs to pick before landing. Everyone is an Astroworker, and your company’s machinery, current objective, and threats shape what needs doing.
One company, several moving parts
Corporate Conquest is the campaign’s main loop. Your crew arrives with a basic office and a buzzsaw, then starts making the infrastructure that will carry a planet’s raw ingredients all the way to a shipping rocket. A friend can be out cutting a route through rock while another returns with plants or animal-derived ingredients; back at the base, other players can extend the factory or feed its soup machines. Those jobs change from one moment to the next as the planet and your production line develop.
The factory is a shared project rather than a collection of separate player builds. Everyone works for the same SoupCo account, and the output goes toward the same market-share goal. A machine that produces soup is useful only when ingredients reach it and cans reach a rocket. Conveyors move items horizontally, while elevators and tube robots carry them between levels. You can build above ground or dig downward, so the plant can grow into a tall, crowded structure or branch into a network through the planet’s rock.
Early production can be handled by hand. You find a couple of ingredients, carry them to a soup machine, wait for a can, and load it into a rocket. The more the company grows, the more trips that simple loop creates. Robots can plant and harvest crops, carry ingredients or cans, and move items through the factory. They do not remove the need to build a route for production: their usefulness depends on where you place them and how the belts, elevators, and machines connect. A sprawling base is less a decorative clubhouse than a working supply chain that the whole team can see and adjust.
Soup recipes come from combinations of the local plants and creatures. Each new planet brings different ingredients and conditions, and the recipe system gives exploration a business purpose: a useful discovery can expand what your company makes, rather than just adding another item to a collection. Completed cans are loaded into rockets and launched to customers. Sales move the SoupCo market-share meter, and reaching the planet’s target lets the campaign advance. Rival corporations compete for that same market, but they are game-controlled opponents rather than other players in a versus mode.
A factory starts with a trip underground
The machinery begins with what you can dig out of the world. Your buzzsaw cuts through terrain and opens routes toward material deposits, oxygen pockets, and ingredients; the same tool helps you get around awkward ledges or blocked passages. The planet is shown as a side-on cross-section, with open air near the surface and layers of tunnels below. You can make your own paths through those layers, then connect your new work area back to the factory.
Exploration has a limit: the Astroworker’s oxygen supply runs down away from safe areas. When a trip takes you deeper, oxygen pockets become important landmarks, and the distance back to base matters. You also carry only a limited number of ingredients at first, so gathering does not immediately turn into a single giant delivery. Vehicles and later equipment can change how much ground you cover, but the basic rhythm remains a trip out, a return, and another part of the factory getting built around what you found.
Plants and animals make each planet feel like more than a pile of raw materials. Flora can be grown around oxygenated areas and harvested for recipes; hostile creatures can be fought for ingredients, but they can also turn an otherwise routine trip into a fight. Some missions put the crew against larger creatures, while the rival companies send attacks toward an expanding factory. The result is a bright, blocky landscape with a slightly ruthless corporate joke underneath it: the soup company is extracting resources from alien worlds, and its workers are expected to keep the cans moving.
Rival companies add a deadline to the production line
Conquest missions are competitions for market share, not open-ended building worlds with no finish line. The other companies make the market move against you, and attacks can damage or interrupt the factory. Turrets and armed guards provide defensive options, while players can also fight enemies directly. Those moments take place alongside the manufacturing work: a shipment still needs to be produced even when the base is under pressure.
The campaign gives planets different objectives and restrictions, so a new landing is not only a larger version of the previous factory. A mission might emphasize reaching a specific target, uncovering useful ingredients, or responding to a planet’s particular layout and hazards. The competitive goal supplies a steady reason to expand, but the machinery remains the main puzzle. There is no fixed blueprint that works everywhere; the amount of usable space, where ingredients grow, and how far the crew needs to travel all affect what the production line can look like.
The pressure is more strategic than precision-heavy. Most of the action comes from running, jumping, cutting terrain, placing factory pieces, and dealing with enemies that get in the way. At the same time, the game can make the expanding operation feel busy: ingredients need to arrive, production needs to continue, and defenses matter when competitors attack. Its tutorials introduce the systems, but there are enough connected pieces that the factory may take some experimenting to understand. The underlying tasks are readable; planning a reliable route through a cramped planet is where the bigger learning curve sits.
Each planet moves the campaign forward
The complete Corporate Conquest campaign includes 27 worlds. Their individual layouts and objectives turn the same soup-making loop into a series of smaller business problems. You land, establish production, build market share, and move on when you have met a planet’s goal. Completed worlds can be replayed in a sandbox mode without rival companies, leaving more space to build and explore without the campaign’s market race.
The factory you build for one Conquest planet does not become a permanent galaxy-wide base. Instead, campaign progress carries forward through unlocks: new technology, robots, equipment, and construction options give later operations a wider toolbox. That structure gives you a reason to revisit the loop with new pieces, but it also means each fresh planet asks you to build its production setup again. If your group enjoys designing a working factory from a small start, that reset creates another compact project; if you want one enormous base that grows without interruption, the campaign is more segmented than that.
Galactic Challenge mode adds a separate set of rotating tasks, including score and time challenges. High placements on the leaderboards can earn Galactic Gum, temporary boosts that can also be used in Conquest and S.O.O.P. Simulator. The challenges give you a different target from simply taking over a planet’s market, while the gum links their rewards back to the company’s other modes.
Soup without the market race
S.O.O.P. Simulator takes the rival corporations out of the equation. You can build, harvest, and explore without chasing the Conquest market-share target. It keeps the machinery and planet work in view, but changes the reason to keep expanding: there is no opposing company pushing toward the same customers. That makes it a distinct option for a crew that wants to shape a factory around a world rather than finish the campaign’s competition.
The SoupCo Planet Database also lets you make and play custom planets. Its image-based map editor lets you shape terrain, resources, and placements before sharing a world with friends and other players. Alongside the built-in campaign and challenges, it gives Nom Nom Galaxy a way to keep the factory loop going after the official planets are familiar.
Is it a fit for your group?
Local split-screen supports two players, while online co-op supports up to four. The tutorial planets are single-player, but regular Conquest missions support local split-screen. Once you can move on a Conquest planet, a second controller’s Start button or Enter can add the local partner. Controller support is full, with keyboard-and-mouse controls available too. Steam Remote Play Together can stream the local mode to a remote guest.
For a pair on one screen, the factory is a compact couch project: both Astroworkers share the same planet, market goal, and production line. Online groups can add up to four employees to the same company, with more people available to explore, transport ingredients, extend the base, and respond to attacks at once. There are no player-versus-player teams; the competition is against the rival companies built into the campaign.
The fit is strongest for friends who like seeing a messy production system gradually make sense. Exploration feeds new recipes, recipes feed machines, and machines turn into rocket deliveries. The group can watch its small office become an above-ground and underground factory while hostile wildlife, oxygen limits, and corporate attacks keep the planet from being a quiet construction screen. It is a focused, repeatable loop rather than an endless shared world, but each new planet gives your SoupCo crew another place to set up shop.