Shapez 2 early access review: beautiful abstract factory building with room for a few more surprises

Over 2000 hours in various Factory games makes me a bit of a purist I guess. In theory I should be the ideal reviewer to enjoy Shapez 2. But I am also the ideal reviewer to pick apart the smallest hiccups and flaws. I am the Anton Ego of Factory games. I don’t like food, I love it. If I don’t like it, I don’t swallow it.

Ah, you needn’t worry. This is by far the most fun I’ve ever had reviewing a game, and Shapez 2 has, in my eyes at least, turned the holy trinity of Factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) into a holy quartet. The stripped-down, everything-is-free-forever approach is quite liberating, and I’ve never had so much fun setting up conveyor belts in my life. But after 40 hours into my save file, I often find myself yearning for a little more creativity in the challenges, a few more curveballs thrown my way.

If you’ve played a factory game before, you’ll know how Shapez 2 works, and you’ll quickly get used to the rhythm of cutting, rotating, and combining shapes. Life begins at the center of the world, where a giant, shape-hungry vortex lives. It wants you to feed it circles. So you place a few extractors on the nearby circle deposit and transport your new shapes straight into the vortex’s mouth. Ding! The vortex is now bored of circles. It wants squares. So you connect a bunch of nearby squares. Ding! Now it wants half circles, so you have to perform your first bit of shape manipulation by cutting a few of those circles in half. Ding! Now the vortex craves half circles attached to rectangles. Ding! Now a circle on top of a square. Ding! Now the circle is red and the square is blue. Ding! Ding! Ding!

You get the idea. There are two major points of difference between Shapez 2 and other factory builders. First, there’s the sandbox nature. There are no enemies to fight and buildings cost no resources, so you’re free to build and tear down belts and buildings as much as you like. Second, there’s the abstraction of the factory products and goals. In Factorio, you build circuit boards, gears, plastic rods, all with the end goal of building a rocket to fly away from the hellish planet you’ve crashed onto. In Shapez 2, you build shapes for no other reason than to feed an ever-hungry vortex that wants to eat shapes.

Heating up shapes for a gluttonous abyss means the game presents you with non-stop tasks and milestone goals, like the ability to paint shapes different colors or use trains to transport shapes across vast distances, so you feel propelled by the intrigue of not knowing what you’ll create next. Still, there’s a sense that things slow down a little as the milestones keep rolling in, as I was hoping for a few extra unlocks that would really get my brain working.

Whether these points of distinction are appealing or repulsive is entirely subjective. I don’t have a problem with the level of abstraction; in fact, I think it’s very intuitive. In other games, you have to hover over a circuit board to figure out how to make it. In Shapez 2, you can clearly see – oh, okay, so that’s a square on the bottom, with the opposite quarters of a circle on top. Cool. This sandbox approach means that many of the problems you encounter in games like Factorio – running out of resources, defending against enemy attacks, exploring the world for new areas – don’t exist here, and will appeal to some players. But I don’t think the game goes far enough to replace those problem-solving moments with other dilemmas.

That said, the game has also grown immensely since I played the Next Fest demo, not just in size but also in polish. One issue I had with the demo was that completing tasks would automatically increase the efficiency and throughput of your belts and factory buildings. Sounds good on paper, but it’s actually annoying for people who care about carefully designing a build based on throughput levels, only to see those levels change a few minutes later. With the Early Access release, however, non-Milestone tasks give you research points that you can spend on improving the efficiency of various buildings – and unlocking entirely new buildings and features. It’s a well-implemented system, and an excellent change that puts control over production rates squarely in the player’s hands where it belongs.

In a somewhat bizarre design choice, Shapez 2 makes all buildings and belts free, but simultaneously awards a currency for both copying and pasting blueprints and placing platforms. Shapez 2’s procedurally generated worlds are vast and—unlike Shapez 1—mostly space you can’t build on. To reach distant “shape asteroids” to mine more interesting shapes, you’ll need to place more platforms like the one where your central vortex is located, giving you more space to build factories. The game’s tutorials also encourage you to pre-build platforms for a specific purpose. For example, I spent some time assembling a platform that holds eight complete conveyor belts of one shape, splitting each one in half down the middle, and then running the two halves in different directions. Then I could simply copy and paste that platform whenever I needed it. Well, as long as I had the Blueprint Points to paste it on and some extra platforms to place down.

It’s a strange, slightly confusing mix. On the one hand, things that normally cost resources in these games, like buildings and belts, are free. On the other hand, things that are normally completely free, like copying and pasting a blueprint, come at a cost. When I played the Next Fest demo, I liked the idea of ​​an extra goal in the background to work on, but now I’m not so sure. Especially since the cost balance seems all skewed anyway. You earn Blueprint Points by entering certain shapes into the vortex, and maybe I was just being a bit too proactive, but I always had millions of Blueprint Points available, and even the most expensive copy-paste jobs would only cost a few thousand at most. It feels like some rebalancing is needed here.

But it’s easy to forget about such minor annoyances once you’re halfway through a large mold-building project. In my current save file, I’m working on a factory that produces over 4,000 of a certain milestone mold every minute. After you complete the last mold in a milestone, you can keep producing that mold and sending it into the vortex to increase your Operator Level, which is mostly for bragging rights, but also earns you some research points, Blueprint Points, and so on for your efforts. It’s a nice touch, both celebratory and motivating.

And once you unlock the final milestones, the milestone shapes become random and the game encourages you to use logic and circuitry to create what’s called a Make Anything Machine (MAM) – the ultimate step in automation. Now that is the kind of intriguing step up in complexity that I want to see more of in the game, and hopefully can spend a lot more time with.

This rings especially true given how the game realizes that satisfaction is at the heart of the factory genre, and leans heavily into it. Dopamine is a byproduct of nearly every building in the game, with wonderfully charming animations showing how shapes actually split apart, rotated, and stacked on top of each other. Some of this small-scale refinement is lost once you grow your factory to a certain size and start spending most of your time zoomed out, copying and pasting entire platforms at once rather than individual buildings and belts. Once you reach that stage, though, you’re well and truly in the grip of the game’s siren song of mass production and automation.

Shapez 2 is a different flavour of factory gaming than I’m used to, but executed to near-masterpiece levels at times, making it very easy to dive in and try something different. Minor balance issues aside, it all feels incredibly tight, with a huge emphasis on comfort, user experience, and satisfaction. I just hope that the depth increases in Early Access, with more types of challenges built into later factory runs and more reasons to explore further afield.