Shapez 2, the sequel to Shapez, by Tobspur Games looks to be something special. It’s a chill factory builder/automation game where all you do is construct machinery to make specific shapes and send them to the big hole in the middle of the map. Sounds simple, but the allure of problem solving and later optimising will beckon upon many industrial engineers, programmers and people obsessed with conveyor belts.
The Steam Next Fest demo for Shapez 2 was superb. So how does the Early Access of Shapez 2 stack up? Is it cut up for the job? Let me paint you a picture of how it is after spending a good 20 hours or so, which is at the time of writing, puts me around the top 50% of the leaderboards.
A Slow Start
Shapez 2 starts slow. And I do mean slow. It took me about five hours of bumbling with the occasional, to the possible disappointment of the developers, idling, until I got through what’s essentially the tutorial level. The tutorial, in which you must complete for you to be certified and allowed to start making shapes with colours and more complex… shapes, will guide you on how each of the elements work and provide tips on how to make the best out of it. The picture-in-picture videos make it easy to follow along and understand what the tip is actually telling you.
As someone who have put in way too many hours on the original Shapez, I felt like I’m on a leash and just dying to start laying down a spaghetti mess of conveyor belts. The Steam Next Fest demo must have ruined me as I sinked in five whole hours to do those extra challenges, whereas that amount of time in the Early Access release only lets me build stackers and cutters for the production line.
The biggest hurdle of the early game in Shapez 2 is space, rather the lack of it. Where Shapez is set in a nebulous infinite space, Shapez 2 is set in the nebulous outer space, but you have limited space to work around with.
Most of the milestones, the critical path objectives, progress incrementally. So you start with one shape, and after completing that, you are supposed to tweak that exact assembly line so that you can make the next shape.
But the way the starting layout is, with just the main space around the big hole (vortex) to work with, it’s very easy to just spiral out into a spaghetti mess and eventually feel limited with the lack of space to build on, which is not what the experience should be. I definitely lost my bearings to the point that I’m connecting a building that create one shape and another shape that requires to go around the big hole with multiple jumps and floor changes.
You’d be better off dismantling and delete production lines for shapes of completed objectives as it takes up valuable space. And it is pain to do so once your factory grows and you need that extra space around the vortex so all your new shapes can fall into the infinite abyss more efficiently.
In that way, Shapez 2 loses a bit of the charm I remember of the original, where you were specifically nudged to leave those past solutions alone for a while, as there’s always more space to work with. Looking at some of the early creations I made before I knew how to play after sinking hours upon hours makes me feel like I’ve come a long way. But for the sequel, you can’t hold on to that nostalgia for long. The factory must grow and all those tutorial buildings you place will just hinder progress the longer you leave them alone.
That being said, I do feel like I missed a trick in the tutorial, and I did. For the longest time I was frustrated not only because of the limited space available, but also the inherit bottleneck that exists from the extraction nodes where they only have at maximum four tiles to connect to the main space. I forget that Shapez 2 is in 3D and I can double that by putting conveyor belts on the second floor. A tooltip to remind that you can also build on multiple floors on the extraction platforms would have been nice.
More Problems More Fun
Once the game begins proper, the Shapez 2 that I remember finally appears, and then some. Working on those small foundations which you can finally plop (alleviating the early game’s space issues) is tremendously rewarding. Sure, the starting foundation in itself is an even smaller space to work with, but with its very specific lanes for input and output, it will force players to think modular, make scalable assembly lines by just plopping a whole foundation. At this point, Shapez 2 transcends another dimension so to speak as there’s another scale of buildings and conveyor belts to work with. Before you know it, you’ll be plopping more than tens of thousands of these individual buildings as the factory grows larger and larger.
The Early Access version includes more buildings than the demo was, and it is nice to see another recurring theme of Shapez 2 is that the essence of the buildings from the original remains there. The way the paint building can be scaled into a production line is just like how it was in Shapez 1 where you have to make the input go parallel with the output. Wiring up the pipes was a bit tricky, but it’s a fun new problem to solve.
The trains, a much-touted feature for this sequel, is fun to work with, so long as you forgo some common practices when making train routes. It’s not a full train building sim, the trains here will run underneath the laid tracks to return to the starting point if you create a point-to-point route. And serves the purpose of rapid shapes (and fluids) transportation over long distances. The space belt, which is now a giant conveyor belt replacing the weird pipes as it was presented in the demo previously, can only carry so much and can only move so fast. The space belt doesn’t clearly present whether the shapes can only transfer on the second or third floor, something the devs are aware and are working on it looks like. Though I am a bit disappointed that the space pipes don’t look like pipes. They are more of a recoloured space belt.
Shapez 2 gives out so, so many tasks (optional objectives) to do to stop you from making this an idle game. If you’re idling, that’s time wasted not optimising some part of the factory or not working on tasks, after all. And you want to do these as they reward you research points to further unlock more buildings as well as upgrade existing actions to be more efficient.
The music of Shapez 2 is splendid as expected. Since this game is a ridiculous time sink you will eventually hear the same songs looping, so it helps that each and every song on the soundtrack (now with an extra kick of synthwave) are bangers after bangers. The Supporter Edition adds some more music, songs that are more low-key than the main game’s more ethereal and otherworld-y vibes. And if you have Shapez 1, you can listen to the original game’s music as well.
Closing Thoughts
Shapez 2’s grander scale of factory building adds extra complexity to the problem solving game and will guarantee to suck the hours of your free time as you tinker with conveyor belts, stackers, cutters and painters all day long. The early game does feel a bit rough, which hopefully can either be smoothen out or shorten. Once the game gets going and more tools are at your fingertips, there’s so many ways to build up your infinite factory. Even in this Early Access form, Shapez 2 is a great time, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out in its final form.
Played on PC. Review key provided by the developer.