In theory, I should then be the ideal reviewer to enjoyShapez 2.

But I’m also the ideal reviewer to tear it apart over the most minor hiccups and defects.

I’m the Anton Ego of factory games.

A close-up of the vortex in Shapez 2 being fed shapes by a number of conveyor belts.

I don’t like food, I love it.

If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow.

Ah, you needn’t worry.

A close-up of a row of shape extractors in Shapez 2 which produce a pointed star shape, which is then immediately chopped in half by the next row of buildings before being output onto a conveyor belt.

Life begins at the centre of the world, where a giant, shape-hungry vortex lives.

It wants you to feed it circles.

The vortex is now bored of circles.

A close-up of a section of a factory module in Shapez 2 which combines two shapes atop one another.

So, you connect up a patch of nearby squares.

Now the vortex craves semicircles attached to rectangles.

Now a circle on top of a square.

A top-down view of a painting module in Shapez 2 which takes in four belts of shapes and paints them blue before outputting them to the other side of the platform.

Now the circle is red and the square is blue.

You get the idea.

There are two big points of differentiation between Shapez 2 and other factory builders.

A section of a factory in Shapez 2, featuring miners, platforms, and belts all interweaved in an area of empty space.

First is the sandbox nature.

The second is the abstraction of the factory products and goals.

Whether these points of differentiation are appealing or repulsive is entirely subjective.

A zoomed out look at a map in Shapez 2, showing a large number of shape asteroids dispersed uniformly across the landscape.

I’ve no issue 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 find out how to make it.

But I don’t think the game goes far enough to replace those problem-solving moments with other quandries.

The game’s tutorials also encourage you to pre-build platforms for a certain purpose.

After that, I could just copy and paste that platform whenever I needed it.

It’s an odd, slightly muddled mixture.

Mostly because the balance seems completely wacky with the costs, anyway.

It feels some rebalancing might be in order here.

But those kinds of minor quibbles are easily forgotten when you’re halfway through a major shape-building project.

It’s a nice touch, at once celebratory and motivational.