Factory building games all have a pretty standard template. There a resource to extract, processes to put it through until finally you offload it somehow until you do that enough times to unlock the next thing. The longevity of the genre comes from the infinite number of variations that the developers have been able to come up with using that basic formula. Fundamentally though there has to be some restriction, some constraint that forces you to optimise your factory’s output so you’re not left waiting for ages to unlock the next cool thing. So you can imagine my absolute terror when shapez 2 gladly announces that it provides you basically unlimited access to most factory elements when other games would limit them. The reason is, of course, that the limit is somewhere else that you wouldn’t readily expect: floorspace.
Taking a quick look at the original shapez shows how the basic concept has remained the same with the increased mechanical depth coming from the increase of dimensions from 2 to 3. The basic premise remains the same though: the portal demands shapes, you build said shapes from the various primitives you have access to, the portal accepts and you’re given access to a wider variety of tools with which to deliver more shapes. Rinse and repeat. Of course just getting the shapes to the portal is only the beginning of the challenge as whilst you could absolutely grind your way through all the levels by just figuring out the base pattern you’ll be stuck to your chair for hours. So the game then changes into one of optimisation and throughput which is a far more interesting and complex puzzle to solve.
I was immediately struck in the face by the art direction I hadn’t seen quite some time: the good old Unity asset store style. Now I’m sure none of the assets that are in shapez 2 are actually from the store but they certainly have that low-fidelity, basic texturing feeling to them that a lot of Unity store assets had back in the day. It’s also likely done very deliberately to keep the CPU/GPU load to a happy minimum as it doesn’t take long for your factory to get a bit hectic which can quickly drop performance. This was one of the last games I played on my old rig before upgrading and I can say that even with a 5+ year old machine shapez 2 didn’t skip a beat. Given that I wasn’t at the limit of all the platforms, tunnels and trains that I could possibly build there’s a very real possibility that things would’ve gotten choppy in the future.
The core loop is very satisfying as it’s pretty easy to figure out the steps you need to do something but there’s a whole lot of variations to get that to the point where it’s truly optimal. At the start your main constraint is going to be throughput as each miner, process and modification that you make has it’s own set of variables in order to make it run at full capacity. Thankfully there’s not many crazy unbounded edge cases to trace down here; everything is a perfectly divisible amount of the maximum capacity that a conveyor belt can handle. The real trick is figuring out how to make all the processes line up properly so you’re not inadvertently blocking one when another is at it’s ideal throughput.
Which, given that you have tools available to see whether or not something is running at ideal capacity, would sound like a straightforward challenge to solve. Trouble is that your factory isn’t a rigid system so changes propagate through it at the speed of a conveyor belt leading to intricate phantom traffic jam problems that’ll cascade throughout your factory. Sure, once you’ve got a validated pattern down this issue is usually easily resolved and you can just wait a handful of minutes to make sure everything is steady state but it’s a problem that only gets exponentially more vexing as your factory’s size increases.
Then you hit the second challenge: floorspace. Whilst certain things are unlimited space is most certainly not and this becomes quite the issue as the steps to create a particular shape become ever more involved. This makes solutions that were once working incredibly obsolete as things start to scale out which usually means tearing down your entire production line in order to optimise it once again. Yes, I hear the screaming crowd in the back saying “BLUEPRINTS” to make the whole process a lot easier and they’re right. However that only makes getting the optimised solution down quicker, it doesn’t solve the reengineering problem to connect it all back together again.
Some of the upgrades make this easier of course and being targeted with them will go a long way to alleviating some of the more frustrating things that you have to deal with early on. There’s also a ton of community built blueprints that you can leverage if you want to short-circuit some of the more fiddly layout challenges but be warned, a lot of them are from end-game players with upgrades that you likely won’t have. That being said the fundamentals they show there can readily translate to any stage of the game, if you know what to look for.
My only real gripe was with how the core progression takes a little bit too long between drinks. There were numerous times where I’d do the calculations on doubling the production capacity and coming up with a figure that looked about the same if I just did nothing (I.E. the build time for it was long enough to warrant not bothering) and once I got the trains mechanic layered on top I suddenly started to feel a bit overwhelmed with it all. Granted, this increase in complexity is the reason you’ll play it but after ~8 hours or so with it I felt it was probably time to leave it alone rather than plug on and burn myself out on it.
For incremental and factory game lovers alike shapez 2 has an awful lot going for it. Whilst the 1.0 release was earlier this year it’s been in Early Access for a good number of years, meaning there’s a solid community that’s sprouted up around it. So if you’re the kind of person to absolutely lose yourself in something like this you’re going to be among a good group of friends. For me, whilst it ticked many of the boxes initially, the complexity grew past the point where I was enjoying it. That’s more a comment on me than it is on the game itself, though.
Rating: 8.25/10
shapez 2 is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total playtime was 7.8 hours with 6% of the achievements unlocked.
