Chop Chop Inc. review: Success is the best revenge

An incremental game all about different ways to chop wood. And breeding hamsters?

Chop Chop Inc. begins with you as a typical sad sack corporate stooge, working in a cubicle at a logging company. You have to do paperwork, wrestle with aging technology, and the coffee pot is a whole hallway away. And you can only have one cup, per new cost-cutting guidelines. Unfortunately the cup you drag your sorry carcass to is your last, as you return to your desk for a termination email. This company has its whole figurative head up its ass, and is so confident it runs the world it has cartoony catapults installed under each cubicle, which of course is activated under yours as soon as you open the layoff message. Welp. You land at a campsite some other poor, fired nerd has abandoned, and a magical treasure box ripped straight out of Banjo-Kazooie lets you know it’s time to get revenge. Grab that axe and get to work, I guess. What else are you gonna do?

Time to get choppin'

With a lot of those outdoorsy, survival and/or crafting games, it’s easy to be dismissive of them by cracking jokes about punching trees. In this case, Chop Chop Inc. bravely stands up to those jokes by being an entire game about the tree-punching part. You’re directly competing with Big Lumber, moving from a humble beginning in a tent you basically steal to building your own warehouses and production facilities while allying yourself with a distant city (also tired of the corporation’s vile presence). You even get to flip off your former employer from a distance, which is fun.

There's also a singing fish thing that drinks a lot

There’s a very silly vibe throughout this game, which helps sell its otherwise mundane framework and tasks. As you chop down trees and build stuff to sell, to in turn buy more ways to chop down trees and build better, more expensive stuff faster, you’re doing things like working with a crazed, RV-dwelling beaver, crabs who chug pre-workout energy drinks and revel in exercise equipment, a bizarre cult of ducks who worship a slot machine, and an… uncomfortably active family of hamsters. It’s certainly a vibe, somehow enhanced by poorly copy-edited text narrating everything. The whole thing lies somewhere between the “janky on purpose” shenanigans of something like Goat Simulator and a simply undercooked and overambitious indie joint, finding a sweet spot that’s charming despite the rough edges.

Crafting chaos

The jank does become a problem sometimes though, especially when it comes to actually building stuff. Chop Chop Inc. does try to elevate itself as a crafting game when you actually put the stuff you’re crafting together. While buildings and stuff simply require clicking on floating chunks of blueprint, there’s a more tactile approach to the individual items you make to sell. For example, if you’re putting a wooden rocking horse together, you stand in front of a table and manually piece together all the wheels, boards, and rods until you have a rocking horse. This can be fun, and kind of reminds me of a game I played during a recent Steam Next Fest that focuses entirely on the putting things together part. It’s much less polished here though, and I often found myself dropping pieces, knocking things over, and struggling to manipulate a piece into place because the geometry or viewing angle was weird, or I put a different piece on beforehand that gets in the way. There’s no indication of a proper order or anything, or an undo button, so sometimes I’d have to start over.

That’s fine once or twice, but often to make money or complete objectives you have to piece together several copies of the same thing. So I’d have to fumble with this crafting mechanism over and over, and depending on the object tedium would quickly set in and I’d be begging any cosmic force willing to listen to grant me some kind of eternal release. Or at least a skip function. I ended up finding the simplest thing worth the most amount of money I could craft, and just doing that over and over whenever I needed money. A different kind of tedium, but better than sifting through all the annoying stuff in finer detail over and over for the more intricate buildables.

I had a pretty good time with Chop Chop Inc., all things considered. It’s janky and gets annoying, but it’s also pretty funny and does a lot with its simple premise. Finding new and weird kinds of trees, upgrading my axe collection, and stumbling into the next goofy scenario were all highlights. Meanwhile, the crafting and moneymaking parts quickly stacked on tedium perhaps faster than the parts I liked could keep pace. As far as punching trees goes, Chop Chop Inc. does a commendable job making the impossible possible: making just that part by itself a fun time.

Chop Chop Inc. is available on August 7, 2026 for PC. A code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Chop Chop Inc.
6
Pros

• Silly vibes and weird characters
• Somehow makes just punching trees fun
• Cathartic if you've ever been laid off

Cons

• Crafting system introduces lots of tedium
• Janky, especially when crafting
• Lots of errors in text