One of the secrets of the factory gaming genre is that it doesn’t matter what the end product is. So long as the whirlsplat gets X number of deelyboppers and trundlehorses per minute, transforming them into the needed dizzydeelys to keep the bundlehopper fully supplied, it’s good. What are these products and machines? Who cares? It’s all going according to plan to feed the most important directive of all: the factory must grow! The process is everything and the output only matters to the extent that it works towards supplying the factory’s goals, so whether it’s rods and plates and casings and electronics, or bits and bobs and thingies and whatnots, as long as the process of transforming each component into the next is internally logical it all works out.
When It’s More Fun to Build Things Than Have Things
Shapez 2is an automation game where the abstract results of the assembly process get tossed into the void at the heart of the factory, because the point is the process rather than its output. The game starts with a large platform floating in space at the heart of what will eventually be a bustle of interacting machine and the large void sits in the center. Four other platforms are connected at the north, south, east and west points, two of which provide circles and the other two supplying squares. The initial factory requests are simple enough; just run a conveyor or two to the void, but soon enough machines show up to cut, rotate and combine the pieces into new shapes. And then things scale up rapidly.
Launch Trailer, Questions Answered for Factory Game Shapez 2
Initially all machines and conveyors are placed on the ground, but soon a second layer is added for double-decker piece processing. When a conveyor can feed four cutters at once and you want four lines of shapes active, it’s a lot easier to have eight cutters on one level and eight on another than trying to manage a row of sixteen. Different machines also process at different speeds, so you might have four cutters feeding six stackers, except that doesn’t really work because while one conveyor may feed four cutters they output two half-pieces, so twelve stackers makes more sense. The math can get messy, but a robust blueprint system means you can create one string of devices and copy/paste it down the line rather than be stuck individually placing a million buildings.
Soon enough new options kick in, such as colored pieces, painters, trains between the endless shape-mines in the infinite space spreading out from the starting base, wires and logic gates and a whole lot more. The main goals of delivering a specific shape unlocks major new upgrades as you complete them, but secondary tasks grant research points that let you buy variations on the different types of machines. The upgrade system also runs off the research points to increase the speed of machines, which can but doesn’t have to involve new math to figuring out best efficiencies becauseShapez 2isn’t forcing any particular speed on the player. New goals require ever more complicated factories, but whether you’re fast and efficient or slow and steady, so long as the void gets its shapes, everything is going to work out right in the end.
Giant Mega-Factories Welcome But Not Required
Shapez 2has released into Early Access and it’s just the start of the automation ahead. The game already plays incredibly smoothly thanks to endless testing from the developer’s Patreon crowd, currently maintaining its framerate with a good hundred thousand objects on screen and the slowdown only getting to be a problem at 500k, although numbers like that are for the major factory fans seeing as the game can be completed in the forty-thousand-building range. Automation fans tend to like to build big, though, so a minimum-building win can be just the start of puttingShapez 2through its paces, especially when the multiple game modes kick in allowing complications like six-piece shapes rather than the standard four or the objectives requiring much more complicated shapes than normal.
Even so,Shapez 2is automation-newbie friendly with all buildings being free and not a pressure mechanic to be found to enforce a need for bigger/faster/better, so there’s plenty of time to learn how to make more efficient layouts simply because it’s fun to do. The end product may be a jumble of pieces that have been cut, painted, combined and stacked into whatever semi-random configuration the system may be asking for next, but the automation systems encourage logical organization of the tools to put it all together. It’s incredibly satisfying to see a large factory take shape and have all its pieces work in perfect or semi-perfect synchronization, and whether you’re chasing after a mega-factory to span the universe or just want to play with machines to watch them do cool things,Shapez 2will be happy to move at your pace.
