Shapez 2: a great automation game, but not for me

If you’d asked me last week what makes an automation game, I’d have said «conveyor belts» without hesitation. But Shapez 2 showed me there’s more to it than that. The game was released in Early Access on 15 August 2024 and received a 98 per cent recommendation rating with around 5,000 reviews on Steam. The trailer really made me want to play it and I didn’t think I could go wrong. And yet it doesn’t captivate me like other automation games, such as Dyson Sphere Program and Satisfactory.

As the name suggests, everything in Shapez 2 revolves around two-dimensional shapes that you manipulate and combine with others. To do this, you send them from machine to machine via conveyor belts. Shapez 2 reduces the principle of automation to one aspect: efficiently chaining up complex processing steps. There’s no story, no game world, no controllable character, no further infrastructure such as electricity and no enemies.

In the beginning, there was a circle

In Shapez 2, you have an unlimited number of conveyor belts and machines at your disposal. You can build anything up and tear it down again as you please. It’s actually a dream for optimising complex systems. The task in Shapez 2 is also simple. You’re supposed to use conveyor belts to throw a certain number of specific shapes into the vortex. The vortex is a large whirlpool on a platform in the middle of empty space. I don’t know where the shapes disappear to, but it’s not important. The main thing is that the vortex is happy.

The first thing I’m asked to do is create 300 semicircles. The game shows me a platform where I find deposits of circular shapes. This is like working with ore deposits in other games, except that you don’t load iron ore or coal onto the conveyor belt; just circles and squares.

So, I build extractors on the circle deposits and guide the circles onto a conveyor belt and into a cutting machine. This machine destroys half of the delivered shape and outputs the rest – in this case semicircles – on the other side. I send these onto a conveyor belt and into the vortex. If it’s received enough semicircles, it rewards you with research points and a new task. If you have enough research points, you can use them to unlock improvements, such as faster conveyor belts or new machines.

Every processing step is visible

A special feature of Shapez 2 is that you can watch how the products are processed. In other automation games, processing machines are like magic boxes: you put a product in and it comes out on the other side having been put together as if by magic. In Shapez 2, though, everything’s visible. The individual steps aren’t particularly complex, but it’s satisfying to see how shapes are cut, rotated, coloured or stacked on top of each other.

And all of this is important, because the simple semicircles don’t last for long. Each basic shape is made up of up to four quarters, which you can remove and use for other purposes. Later you have to really think about which machines are best to remove two diagonal quarters from a circle, colour a quarter square and insert it into the circle.

Shapez 2 doesn’t offer a real game world that I can explore. Instead, I find myself in a kind of pseudo-space with swirling nebulae in the background. Further on from my starting platform with the vortex, other platforms float around, where I break down more shapes and liquids. I connect the platforms using wide «space conveyor belts» which can transport the material from four normal conveyor belts.

Watching little robot arms manipulate the shapes with relaxing, ethereal sounds and subtle background noise is really fun. There’s almost a hustle and bustle.

An artificial bonus for long-term motivation

Some tasks are defined as milestones. After completing them, it makes sense to deliver the requested product to the vortex. This increases my operator level and gives me more rewards. This trick is intended to ensure that after reaching a goal, I don’t abandon the necessary production, but instead build complex factories with as many vortex products as possible. The end products have no other purpose.

Completing a milestone can take quite a long time. After just a few hours of playing, I’m supposed to deliver 14,000 «chessboard squares with a finial on them». Even though I’ve already used all the relevant raw shapes in my space quadrant, it takes a long time. I can’t make the game run any faster. While I’m waiting, I take care of small side tasks, tearing down the production lines again after I’ve finished. Or I look to see which milestone shapes are required next.

Normally I pause games even when I leave the computer for a moment – but with Shapez 2, I deliberately leave the game running when I get something to eat. It’s not a good sign: I’m starting to get bored.

The controls sit, fit, wobble and there’s room to breathe

Building and tearing down is part of the job in Shapez 2. And the controls go with it. Leading conveyor belts to destinations via different corners and levels works perfectly. Before long, I’ve internalised the hotkeys I can use to select and break up longer systems. Copying, cutting and pasting with the well-known keyboard shortcuts CTRL C, X and V also work. This makes it easy to copy entire complexes and paste them in a mirror image or one level higher.

Soon, I also have access to a blueprint book. This allows me to save any area of my factory as a blueprint and then insert it again later, so I no longer need to repeatedly rebuild the same factory areas.

While you can delete, copy and paste individual buildings and conveyor belts in the normal construction view, the platform view is about the big picture. I use it to select entire platforms with all their contents and copy them. So, it makes sense to concentrate major editing steps on one platform and then save them as a construction plan. For example, if you want to remove a quarter from a shape, you can just add this platform from the construction plan. In other words, my factory’s becoming modular.

Why I still haven’t totally warmed to Shapez 2

Shapez 2 is largely frustration-free. There’s nothing missing and you can build large production lines in no time at all, so nothing stands in the way of being able to tinker with automation. But this gameplay doesn’t really motivate me either. After testing the game for around ten hours, I had to think about what was bothering me for a while. I miss the emotional rollercoaster of frustration and joy I get from Dyson Sphere Program, Satisfactory and other games. I miss the frustration I feel when I notice that I don’t have important things with me in the wilderness and have to trudge back to camp. I miss the joy I feel when I finally manage an improvement or gather enough resources to solve a bottleneck. For me, there’s neither much frustration nor much joy in Shapez 2.

While other factory building games give me tempting goals that solve existing problems or simply promise fun, there are none in Shapez 2. There are always new tasks, but completing a task isn’t that satisfying. Also, the shapes you make are just an end in themselves. In other games, you can make products that have a purpose. In Shapez 2, you only get shapes to – at most – make more shapes.

I’m also not really into modular construction. Of course, it isn’t a must, but I notice that out of laziness I keep copying entire platforms and combining them in new ways without knowing exactly how I’ve solved the actual problems.

Shapez 2: nicely put together, but not for me

My criticism isn’t a flaw in the game; it’s a problem with my expectations, which are based on other games. In a blog post, the developer Tobias Springer describes how these gameplay decisions came about. Shapez 2 was developed in close collaboration with the Shapez 1 community. Infinite resources, abstract shapes, simple graphics and relaxing gameplay without enemies are points that were most important to the fans of the first version.

These features were retained in Shapez 2 and the gameplay was supplemented with a lot of features requested by the community. The game is technically excellent: easy to use, beautifully designed and with appropriate music and pleasant background noises. But if you prefer to fill a real game world with your factory and not just work with abstract products, Shapez 2 is probably not for you.