I guess my 2000+ hours in various factory games makes me a bit of a purist. In theory, I should be the ideal critic to enjoy Shapez 2. But I'm also the ideal critic to tear it apart for the slightest glitches and flaws. I'm the Anton Ego of factory games. I don't like food, I like it. If I don't like it, I don't swallow it.
Oh, no need to worry. This was the most fun I've ever had reviewing a game, and Shapez 2, in my mind at least, transformed the holy trinity of factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) into a holy quartet. Its stripped-down, forever-free approach is liberating, and I've never enjoyed putting so many conveyor belts in my life. But 40 hours into my save file, I found myself frequently wishing for a little more creativity in the difficulty, a few more curveballs thrown my way.
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If you've ever played a factory game before, you'll know the drills for Shapez 2, and you'll quickly get used to the rhythm of cutting, rotating, and combining shapes. Life begins at the center of a world inhabited by a giant, shape-hungry vortex. It wants you to give it circles. So you place a few extractors on a nearby bed of circles and feed your new shapes directly into the vortex's mouth via a conveyor belt. Ding! The vortex is tired of circles. It wants squares. So you combine a patch of nearby squares. Ding! It now wants half circles, so you need to do your first shape manipulation by cutting some of those circles in half. Ding! The vortex now wants half circles connected to rectangles. Ding! Now a circle on top of a square. Ding! Now a circle is red and a square is blue. Ding! Ding! Ding!
You get the idea, I think. There are two major differences between Shapez 2 and other factory builders. First, the sandbox nature. There are no enemies to fight and buildings don't require resources, so you're free to build and destroy as many arches and buildings as you want. Second, the abstraction of factory products and objectives. In Factorio, you build circuit boards, gears, and plastic rods, all with the ultimate goal of building a rocket that will fly you away from the hellish planet you've crashed on. In Shapez 2, you build shapes for no other reason than to feed a constantly hungry vortex that wants to eat the shapes.
Chefing shapes for a greedy chasm means the game keeps throwing tasks and milestone goals at you, like painting shapes different colors or using trains to transport shapes across large distances, so you're left with the curiosity of not knowing what to do next. But you still feel like things are slowing down a little as the milestones keep coming, because I was hoping for a few more unlocks that would really exercise my brain.
Whether these points of differentiation are attractive or repulsive is entirely subjective. I don’t have a problem with the level of abstraction; in fact, I think it’s very intuitive. In other games, you have to hover over a circuit board to figure out how to do it. In Shapez 2, you can clearly see—okay, so this is a square at the bottom and opposite quadrants of a circle layered on top. Great. This sandbox approach means that many of the problems you encounter in games like Factorio—depleting resources, defending against enemy attacks, exploring the world for new areas—aren’t here, and will appeal to some players. But I don’t think the game goes so far as to replace these problem-solving moments with other dilemmas.
However, the game has grown considerably in not only scale but also complexity since I played the Next Fest demo. One issue I had with the demo was that completing quests would automatically improve the efficiency and output of your belts and factory buildings. It sounds great on paper, but it’s actually very annoying for those who care about carefully designing a structure based on output levels, only to see those levels change after a few minutes. However, with the early access release, non-Milestone quests will earn you research points that you can choose to spend on improving the efficiency of different buildings – as well as unlocking entirely new buildings and features. It’s a well-implemented system, and a great change that puts control of production rates directly into the player’s hands, where it belongs.
One slightly odd design choice is that Shapez 2 makes all buildings and arches free, but it also imposes a currency on both copying and pasting blueprints and placing platforms. Shapez 2’s procedurally-generated worlds are expansive and—unlike Shapez 1—mostly outer space, where you can’t build. To reach farther-flung “shape asteroids” to pull out more interesting shapes, you’ll need to place more platforms, like the one that houses your central vortex, to increase your real estate for building factories. The game’s tutorials also encourage you to pre-build platforms for a specific purpose. For example, I spent some time building a platform that took eight full conveyor belts of a shape, split them in half, and then spun the two halves out in different directions. After that, I could just copy and paste that platform whenever I needed it. That’s as long as I had the Blueprint Points to paste into and some spare Platforms to place.
It's a strange, slightly mixed bag. On the one hand, the things that normally require resources in these games, like buildings and arches, are free. On the other hand, the quality of life things that are normally completely free, like copying and pasting a blueprint, have a cost. When I played the Next Fest demo, I liked the idea of having an extra goal to mess around with in the background, but I'm not so sure about it anymore. Mostly because the balance of costs seems completely insane. You earn Blueprint Points by entering certain shapes into the vortex, and maybe I was a little too proactive, but I always had a few million Blueprint Points, and even the most expensive copy-and-paste jobs cost a few thousand dollars at most. I feel like there needs to be some rebalancing here.
But these kinds of minor issues are easily forgotten when you're halfway through a major shape-building project. In my current save file, I'm working on a factory that churns out over 4,000 of a particular milestone shape every minute. Once you've completed the last shape in a milestone, you can continue churning out that shape and send it into the vortex to increase your Operator Level; this is mostly just for bragging rights, but it also gives you some research points, Blue Print Points, etc. for your trouble. It's a nice touch, both celebratory and motivating.
And when you unlock the final milestones, the milestone shapes become randomized and the game encourages you to use logic and circuitry to create what's called the Make Anything Machine (MAM), the ultimate step in automation. This It's the kind of intriguing and complex progression throughout the game that I want to see more of, and I hope to spend more time with it.
This is especially true considering the game recognizes that the cornerstone of the factory genre is satisfaction, and leans heavily on it. Dopamine is a byproduct of nearly every building in the game, and it features wonderfully captivating animations that show shapes actually being pulled apart, rotated, and stacked on top of each other. Some of this small-scale refinement is lost once you get your factory to a certain size and start spending most of your time zooming out, copying and pasting entire platforms at a time rather than individual buildings and arches. But once you get to that stage, you’re in the grip of the game’s siren song of mass production and automation.
Shapez 2 is a different kind of factory game to what I'm used to, but it's executed to a near-masterpiece level at times, making it very easy to dive in and try something a little different. Minor balancing issues aside, everything feels incredibly well-wrapped, with a heavy emphasis on comfort, user experience, and satisfaction. I can only hope that the depth increases in early access, that more challenge types are added to later factory processes, and that there are more reasons to explore further afield.