Chop Chop Inc.: another gathering game, but this one has the good sense to end up as a production line

Another gathering game. You are allowed to sigh: the chop, collect, sell, upgrade formula has become a genre of its own, with dozens of clones shipping every quarter. At this stage the real question is no longer whether cutting wood is pleasant, but whether the game offers anything else once the novelty wears off.

Good news: Chop Chop Inc. does. And no, rest easy, there is no giant mole lurking in the forest waiting to serve as a mid-game boss. You are spared the repeat.

From axe to factory

The pitch is gloriously stupid: you get fired from Furnox Corp, and all you have left is an axe, a few trees and a taste for revenge. You fell, you cut logs into planks, you craft furniture, you sell it.

What saves the whole thing is the trajectory. The manual labour of the early game gradually turns into optimised production lines, with better machines, higher throughput and high-value furniture sets that trigger bonus payouts. So you move from a gathering game to an automation game, and that shift is exactly what most of its competitors lack. You reinvest, you unlock new areas and new tree types, you upgrade your character's strength and stamina.

The tone does the rest. NullRef Entertainment leans into the absurd and owns it: among the craftable objects are a wooden PC, on the highly scientific principle that wood has excellent thermal properties, and a wooden weight bench, since splinters only make you stronger. The world is populated with oddballs and secrets, and the trees have physics we will politely call questionable.

What not to expect from it

The game costs about two coffees, and you have to take it for what it is: a sweet, not a Factorio. Automation is a pleasant destination, not a system to optimise over hundreds of hours, and the depth stops where real factory games begin.

The second risk belongs to the whole genre: the loop eventually shows. Chop, process, sell, reinvest works as long as the unlocks arrive at a good pace, and a game like this lives or dies on its progression curve. No reviews exist yet to judge it, the game having only just launched.

But at that price, with that shift toward production and that schoolboy humour of building a computer out of wood, the contract is honest. This is the kind of game you launch for twenty minutes while waiting for something else, and put down three hours later with a dresser factory.