shapez 2 - Factory

Shapez 2 made a fan of me, someone who isn’t a usual fan of this genre, and someone who easily feels overwhelmed by its complex systems. Even with my comparatively meager builds, I had a great time with the game, falling instantly for its uniquely relaxing vibe and its special style of progression, pushing you into limitless expansion at your own pace and using incredible factory tools to accomplish it.

With shapez 2, Tobias Springer takes the franchise to new heights, delivering a stellar sequel that improves on the original in every way. Its relaxing gameplay, smooth performance, and satisfying production-building offer hours of fun for both newcomers and veterans. Despite a forgettable soundtrack and occasional forced redesigns, it’s an easy recommendation for fans of management games like Factorio or Satisfactory.

Shapez 2 is an automation game with just about all the rough edges sanded off, built to make creating what look like incredibly complicated layouts as simple as possible. It may take a little effort to sort out the best way to, for example, create a platform that maximizes stacking two items, completely handling two sets of four belts with no backing up, but then you save it as a blueprint and the tangle of conveyors and stackers is now another tool in the menu that can be laid down with a mouse click. White paint needs three different paints mixed together, two at a time, but create a single paint-mixing platform handling two fluids running at top speed, copy it to let the output of the first combine with the third color, then copy both platforms together and stack them three high, save as blueprint, and done! Handy as that is, though, the randomness of the shape deposits means you'll probably need to poke around hand-crafting solutions every bit as often as relying on your blueprints, and there's always a new challenge that requires retooling what you know. And then building bigger, as the little factory clustered around the entrance to the void grows to meet its ever-escalating needs.