Shapez is a streamlined factory management game where the things you build are colored shapes in their most abstract senses. Starting very simple and quickly building up the complexity, I had a really good time with a game that was not too concerned about optimizing and making the most of limited resources. Creating complex patterns of machines that would take shapes and colors, cut them, rotate them and fuse them without any kind of stress was really enjoyable. It became a bit too complex for me at some point and I couldn’t really figure out what to do, so I dropped the game, but otherwise I had a great time!
The game starts fairly simple; you have an infinitely big - or at least, infinite-adjacent - field of shapes and color nodes. You need to build extractors on them, conveyor belts to move things around and ultimately send them on your hub. The game’s progression is quite neat, because you unlock new mechanics and upgrades by sending enough shapes to your hub, so you can work on whatever objective you want. There are a few rules that must be kept in mind, like if a machine cuts a shape in half and you just need one half of the shape, the other needs to be discarded or the machine will clog up, but it starts really smoothly.
I quickly got irked by my lack of understanding of how to optimize my processes, it was very frequent that I would see spots where resources would get clogged at some machine or anothe while another part of my setup ran sub-optimally. As the complexity of what the game asked of me, it was more and more difficult to kept things going perfectly, especially when upgrading my belts and multiple types of machines. Improving the speed that my shapes were stacked or painted suddently meant that either I wasn’t producing enough to keep these newly-upgraded machines working at full speed, or it was causing a clog down the line. The idea of destroying whole segments of my production line in order to optimize them never appealed to me, so all I did was more or less build more, hoping to provide what the game required of me next.
The list of tools you unlock grows considerably and you get more ways to cut, sort, stack, paint and move things around as the game requires shapes that need to be more and more complex. I really enjoyed the copy/paste option that you get at some point because now when I had a setup that worked, it was easy to replicate it multiple times. Wires were something else that I couldn’t play much with, but it allowed to fine tune which parts of the machines worked, thus making some things easier.
Ultimately, I had to stop when the game requested shapes that I couldn’t understand how to make. I wish there had been a tutorial (or that I had payed more attention to it) because these shapes required parts to be stacked in a way that I couldn’t figure out. It was really unfortunate, because up until then I could manage the game’s progression, but whenever I tried stacking parts on top of “empty” spots, it gave me strange results and I could never get it right, so I stopped around there.
It’s a bit of a shame, because otherwise I would’ve probably kept going at Shapez, it’s fun, chill, and a bit challenging all at the same time. A neat little factory management game for sure!
