Shapez 2 is the Factory Game I Wanted
In which we make more spaghetti than factory
A few years ago I played a little bit of a game called shapez,1 a factory game that boiled the formula down to the cutting and colouring (and rotating and stacking etc) of abstract shapes on an infinite grid. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t quite click and Steam tells me I only have 3.7 hours in it at time of writing.
A few weeks ago shapez 2 entered Steam Early Access, and wow is it good.
I didn’t actually buy it immediately: I have a lot of other games on the go right know (way too many for my limited free time) and most of my gaming right now is actually done either on a handheld or streamed from my desktop to my TV and played on a controller. I spend far too much time at my desk doing my dayjob, and it takes something special lately to persuade me to sit up in my chair and use a mouse for a moment longer.
This game did it though, and I’m a big fan.
The basic premise is the same, in that you’re still stacking and rotating shapes. Placing components does not cost anything in almost all circumstances, and there are no time limits. The devs reckon they have done better optimisation than on the original game,2 which is good, and I like the new visual aesthetic. It’s two additional changes that have really changed the game though: the second (and later, third) level; and the zoomed out platform view.
I actually think the latter is much more important to me than the former. Adding extra levels obviously makes certain things easier to design more compactly and symmetrically, which is a great quality of life improvement, but my favourite part of the new game is designing standalone components that fit on one or two tiles, ideally with only two levels, and reusing them in different combinations to produce target shapes. These can then be refined later as new techniques are developed or made available (or necessary).
As a result I’ve sunk a lot more than 4 hours into the new game: I’m now up to 24 hours, which has meant that I’ve completed the Final Qualification and unlocked all upgrades, though there is a harder difficulty and at least one major mechanic left to explore.3 I’m also in the top 10% for ‘operator levels’ though I expect this doesn’t mean anything notable in practise given how the distribution of person-hours in these games tend to go.
There are a whole heap of other quality-of-life improvements between, from additional colour modes (on top of the already-existing colourblind mode)4 to - and this was so basic I only realised it was a thing when I went back to the original shapez - the ability for conveyor belts to split and merge without “balancer” components.
I enjoy the pared-down approach of this factory game compared with it’s competitors, like Factorio and Satisfactory, that place you as a character in a developed world. I don’t much care for survival, and while there is something to be said for exploration that’s not what I tend to do in this kind of game. It’s also a factor, I will admit, that chucking a completely abstract universe of shapes into a hole is a lot less uncomfortable to me than grinding up a fully-realised alien world and feeding it into a rocket machine. Your mileage may seriously vary on that one. Maybe the game where you can’t see the horrible consequences of your actions is the problematic one? Who can say - not me anyway.
Regardless, I’ve been having a lot of fun. My tendency to fit together pre-constructed modules via space pipes and trains and the like has produced the most delicious kind of factory: the spaghetti factory!
As an ‘early access’ game shapez 2 is in a weird place: it’s a complete and polished game, but a relatively short one. They apparently intended this and have plans for much more, and I’m extremely curious to see what those are. Even if there is nothing revolutionary though I think when I next have a hungering for a factory game this is where I’ll go.
Actually it was called shapez.io originally.↩︎
For what it’s worth both games seem to run fine via Proton on my nearly ten-year-old PC.↩︎
Specifically I haven’t made a ‘Make-Anything Device’, or MAD, and in fact have not experimented with the circuitry at all.↩︎
I switched from the default RGB to RYB as soon as colour-mixing became a thing - because the colours are liquids that are painted on to shapes it felt intuitive to me that we should be working with subtractive colour mixing, but since I’m not a graphic designer CMYK doesn’t make sense to me so the primary colours I learned in primary school seemed the most reasonable. I’d still like a colour blind version of this though.↩︎