Review: Space Rock Breaker

January 27th 2026

Space Rock Breaker - Steam, $2.99. Demo Currently Available.
The TLDR: A single player space game where you blow up rocks, upgrade your ship and repeat — I highly recommend the game!

If you were a child of the 80’s you might remember the arcade game Asteroids. This was a cutting edge, wire frame graphics, game where you controlled a triangle and blew up wire frame asteroids to score points. The goal was to get the high score and have your three letter initials stored in digital history for as long as the arcade cabinet remained plugged in.

Space Rock Breaker takes that formula, slaps on some modern pixel art style graphics and adds incremental, roguelike elements to keep you coming back and playing again and again.

Breaking Rocks
The main gameplay loop revolves around breaking rocks with your space ship. It has a lot in common with games like Vampire Survivors, as your ship will target the nearest asteroid and shoot it until it blows up. You have to fly close to the mined resource to pick it up and your run will end when you run out of fuel or into an asteroid. As you unlock parts of the skill tree, your fuel reserves will grow, weapon output will increase and your time in each expedition will last longer, resulting in more returned rocks, more money and more unlocked skills. As you unlock the hyperdrive, you open up levels which can range from common to legendary. The higher tier levels come with better materials but as you progress through stages, you’ll notice that your ship runs out of fuel quickly without the proper upgrades.

Plinko Refineries
At the end of each expedition you will return to the refinery. This takes the form of a Plinko game where the rocks fall through the pegs and into multipliers at the bottom. In the early game you’ll be getting one dollar per rock. These numbers increase as you unlock new asteroid types and multipliers through the skill tree.

Skill Tree and The Prestige and Loot Boxes
The skill tree in this game starts off small giving you minor upgrades to damage output, fuel reserves and new weapons. As you play the game further, the skill tree will reveal more branches and grow larger, gradually unlocking more weapons, white hole generators that pull all materials towards you and further upgrades to your survivability . In your expeditions you might come across keys which open loot boxes, the rewards from these granting bonuses to multipliers, damage output, bumper rewards on the plinko machine and more.

As you come to the later stages of the game, you also run across artifacts. These items have a special place in your home base and offer one time bonuses to aspects of your ship. After you kill your first boss, you will unlock prestige. This completely resets your skill tree and returns you to the beginning of the game but offers you some permanent upgrades which stack on top of your skill tree unlocks.

Sound Design
Everything about this game sounds right. You are greeted with an 80’s synthwave style playlist that runs throughout the game without interfering. The dev has done this clever thing with the music that I didn’t notice at first. When you are in menus the music retreats into a muted version of just the main melody and as you launch into a new expedition, the equalizer ramps up, bringing in the bass and middle and removing the muted effect. It doesn’t get old.

Missiles have a satisfying swoosh, there’s a metallic pop when asteroids break and the Plinko refinery has a satisfying array of boops combined with the sound of a super Mario power up. If there is one complaint to be had of the sound, it’s when you get to the end game and are dropping hundreds of materials into the refinery, the sound cuts out at times as its probably unable to figure out what sound to play.

How does it play?
The game is great, and after about three hours, i’m definitely interested in jumping back in again to see how prestige works. Your ship follows the direction and movement of the mouse cursor, meaning this is a game that can be played with one hand (great for when my cat jumps up and wants some attention). There is a solid retro feel that comes from the music and the overall graphics, which looks like a game from the early Sega CD era. It runs smoothly on a modern computer, even when the screen starts to fill up with projectiles, asteroid bits and the asteroids themselves.

Recommendation
At $2.99 I highly recommend this game and giving it a go. The gameplay is simple and addictive and will keep you going for “one more expedition.” You can just about get all the achievements and unlocks after about 3 hours of game time. Prestige mode resets your progress with some permanent upgrades, allowing you to replay the game multiple times over.

If you want to pick up a copy for yourself, head over to the steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4035270/Space_Rock_Breaker/

If you want to see some gameplay, head over to this link for a stream of the first 3 hours!