I delight in looking at shapes, I suspect we all do. They are the building blocks of life, often turned into literal building blocks handed to us as wee babes to help us make sense of the world. Games like Shapez 2, then, feel like a natural through line from this point, a mechanical orchestra that lets you put all sorts of shapes together to build factories that produce more shapes endlessly. And now that line has seen its end, as Shapez 2 has left early access today, arriving at its 1.0 release a little less than two years on from its original launch.
Shapez 2 (Electric Boogaloo?) is a factory-building game distilled to its most base elements: the factory building. There’s no need to worry about resources or costs, you just build and build and build until you’ve automated your factory to such a degree that you can revel in all the shapes it produces without a worry in the world. Ollie was quite complimentative about it in his early access review, saying that it had “turned the holy trinity of factory games (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) into a holy quartet.”
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With 1.0 comes some new stuff too. There’s a whole new mode to try out called Manufacture Mode. “This mode addresses one of the biggest feedback points we got during early access: factories you needed to build for a specific shape were no longer being at later stages in the game,” explains a Steam blog post. “In the new Manufacture Mode you’ll focus on re-building your Vortex Platform by trading shapes with Trade Stations and building large-scale, permanent factories.” There are now achievements, too, and modding support to boot.
You’ll find a huge range of other changes, like visual improvements, tweaks to Classic Mode, a new tutorial, and much more besides. You can read about all the other additions right here in that aforementioned Steam blog post, and if the game takes your conceptual fancy, you can pick it up on Steam now.
