Nobody really knows why the hole in the universe wants what it wants, but nobody much cares either. The hole has requests; the hole rewards the fulfillment of its requests. Granted, the reward is generally a new tool to help with the construction of bigger and more intricate creations, but by then the process has become the motivation. Each new construct becomes a puzzle of efficient assembly, and while brute forcing the solution piece-by-piece is certainly an option, there’s bound to be a faster and more elegant way to reach the goal. Especially when the universe extends out forever, an endless plane of shapes and colors to mine for as many pieces as even a bottomless pit could ever need.
Shapez 2is the massively-upgraded sequel to the game thatstarted its lifeasShapez.iobefore removing the inconveniently URL-creating tag at the end. The basic and semi-monochrome look ofShapezdidn’t stop it from being a hit, thanks to its focus on making automation the heart of the game and letting things like worrying about resources or paying for machines fall to the wayside. It looked simple, but there was a lot of depth in its tools, and the game scaled up practically forever.Shapez 2takes that premise and ramps up the visual presentation while setting the factory in space, and the demo does a great job showing off the familiar while giving hints at the new gameplay elements ahead.
Launch Trailer, Questions Answered for Factory Game Shapez 2
The basic premise hasn’t changed: there’s a giant receptacle you need to supply with a steady stream of shapes mined from deposits scattered around the map. Each shape can be divided into four quadrants, but at the start it’s enough just to deliver a number of circles into the hole. Place some miners to pull up the circles from their pit, run a few conveyor belts to the central hole and watch the delivery numbers go up. Once the goal is reached, delivery of that shape no longer matters, so you can either erase the setup or use some of the bits as the basis for the next request. Which will be the first of many steps on the path towards constructing more intricate shapes from the pieces you can find on the map.
The cutter divides a shape in two, so delivering half-circles and half-squares is easy enough. Rotators and stackers come next, and here’s where the first hints of complexity kick in. Rotators do exactly what it sounds like, turning a shape one quarter rotation to line up properly for the next step. The goal doesn’t care if the orientation is off, a half-circle is fine whether it be left, right, bottom, or top, but the stacker is going to merge two shapes exactly as they’re fed into the machine. If you want a shape that’s half square on one side, half circle on the other, it’s best not to feed it the right half of the two needed components. Each machine also has variants that can be unlocked by completing bonus goals as well, such as rotators that go clockwise, counter-clockwise and 180 degrees. It may not sound like much on paper, but the version of the splitter that takes two inputs and swaps their left and right halves is the kind of device that can take a huge sprawl of belts, stackers and rotators and knock it down to four machines.
Meanwhile it’s hard not to notice this is all happening on a single platform floating in space, and there are an endless array of deposits floating around out there. TheShapez 2demo doesn’t go quite so far as to add paint, which will be necessary as color becomes part of the shape requirements, but it does have a couple of pre-colored shapes to play with once you can reach them. Platform mode lets you place asteroids in the surrounding space, and like the machines they’re functionally free although with an upper limit on how many you can deploy. Mining platforms go on top of deposits while blank platforms are great for prepping the piece prior to landing on the main area. Belt platforms come pre-installed with conveyors, and if you don’t feel like watching the shapes make their way down the line, connected mini-platforms accelerate them through tubes for quicker delivery. Space is big, but there’s no need to travel it inch by inch.
Shapez 2has been in the works for a while now, with a public beta earlier last year plus ongoing builds for Patreon supporters, and the polish is showing in the demo. Blueprint mode, for example, lets you do a simple ctrl-c for a single building or shift-c for large groups of machines all working as a single unit, and then can be either plopped down as many as needed on the platform or saved to the blueprint tab for later use. Just about everything has a keyboard shortcut, and it doesn’t take too long before you’re typing as much as clicking to place each new device. Each machine also shows what it’s output will be without needing to wait for the shape to process, making it much easier to create detailed factories with far fewer bugs in the item-flow than might be expected. Rotating pieces and swapping left and right halves would be more maddening than fun if you had to keep it all in your head, but the clear presentation makes sure you know what you’re getting before things get out of hand.
TheShapez 2demo is a meaty chunk of game, and while it doesn’t go so far as to show off trains or why you’d need the massive sprawl shown off in screenshots and the trailer, it’s still satisfying to come up with designs of interconnected machinery and tune it to something resembling perfection. Shapes get chopped up into their component parts then rotated, swapped and stacked, with particular attention paid to the speed of each device so that a 150 units-per-minute conveyor is feeding five 30 UPM machines. Importantly, though, while perfect efficiency is nice, it’s also not a requirement so long as the delivery gets where it needs to go. There’s no threat to race against or danger of blowing a time limit, so learning to fit things together for best effect either comes as a result of playing with all the toys or not, and the game won’t punish you beyond taking a couple minutes extra to reach the next milestone.Shapez 2is enjoyably relaxing, but the kind of relaxing that, when you’re done, you come up slightly amazed at the intricate clockwork beast it let you create.
