Shapez 2 Review — The Circle Cycle

Shapez 2 is a game all about industrial efficiency. Tasked with creating various shapes and designs, you are responsible for facilitating their production and feeding them to the ever-hungry (for funny squares and circles) void. The challenge is not simply in producing these objects, which may not always be available in the exact shape or color you need, but in ensuring their flawless production and delivery through complex systems of conveyor belts and factory machinery. You can feel this ever-pressing challenge of trying to figure out how to deliver production better: you start by getting the object to the portal, then question how you can do it faster and in larger numbers. This drives you to tear down everything you built and start over, going bigger, better, and more complex, all in that desire to chase perfect factory efficiency.

This is an honestly convoluted process that I hope to explain better through images, capturing my early-game production of red circles, a seemingly simple shape, but one that requires a fair bit of engineering to capture properly.

Satisfying your production demands in shapez 2 begins by mining the resources you wish to shape into the portal’s specific shape-craving. To create red circles, we first have to find an asteroid with red circular shapes in supply. It would be easy, of course, to just mine red circles straight out of the ground and pump them to our vortex, but things are never that easy, and the circles we pull from this asteroid have a corner missing.

Therefore, I realized that I would need to smash two halves of a circle together at a stacker (a machine which combines two shapes into one by stacking one on top of the other) to create a full circle. To do that, I needed first to create two opposite-facing half-circle production lines to feed into the stacker. To do that, I had to mine the semicircles out of the ground, rotate them in the desired directions, and cut out the bit of the circle I didn’t want so that it would create an even half-circle. Each of these tasks requires a full production line, creating a conveyor system that starts at the mine and ends at the vortex, producing a completely different shape at the end than how it was when it left the mine.

That step-by-step thinking creates a solution, often a messy one that delivers a completed product to the vortex, albeit slowly, with the production line often facing stoppages and the progress on the demanding production goal ticking away very slowly.

It’s that desire for speed that is the exact reason shapez 2 doesn’t have a speed-up time option: everything happens in real time, and your desire to accomplish your goal more quickly is what drives a player toward efficiency. My once-simple production line therefore evolved: where once everything was done on one connected belt, I started to scale up my production, with entire steel islands built just to produce one half-circle. Another island existed just to combine them, and as I continued to increase the scope of the production, the faster my red circles were delivered.

Things only expand from here, reaching nigh infinite levels of complexity and efficiency. You’ll find yourself surrounded by layers upon layers of conveyor belts, thousands of machines, and huge transportation networks that incorporate elevators, high-speed monorails, and complex sorting structures. I’m not a factory-gamer who can even come close to the level of complexity and freedom available in shapez 2, so I can only fathom what an experienced Factorio player might build after a hundred hours in this game.

Not everything in shapez 2 made sense to me. Like trying to direct traffic in Cities: Skylines, making a series of connected conveyor belts work as efficiently as possible is akin to witchcraft for me. That is part of the appeal, however, as the game doesn’t hold your hand or strangle you with time limits. With nothing more than a simple goal, ever-advancing means of accomplishing it via technology unlocks, and some incredible electronic music as a soundtrack, shapez 2 effortlessly becomes a relaxing game of brain-teasing production puzzles without a real stress factor. It is a game that challenges your thinking without ever really challenging you: nothing exists beyond the end goal, and nothing pushes you towards it besides your desire to succeed.

Some players might find issue with the lack of direction in shapez 2. While the game constantly asks you to produce specific shapes of increasing complexity, there is never any real threat or push to move forward beyond your own will to complete the task, and the satisfaction of making big factories. If that’s all you need, this game is certainly for you.

I liked shapez 2 back when I first played it, prior to the game’s Early Access launch. Since then, the game has massively improved and expanded in scope, much like your production lines. Now, I consider myself a fan; though I’m not the type of player who usually plays these games, and the complexity stuns me at times, I did have a great time playing shapez 2 and can really appreciate the unique form of relaxation this game provides. I can’t imagine anyone, intended audience or not, outright disliking this game, and I promise you’ll have a good time with it if you only try.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of shapez 2. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Shapez 2 is available on Steam.