shapez review - making shapes has never been so addictive
The beginning of shapez is incredibly simple, deliver a few simple shapes that you can find next to the delivery hub.
With each delivery goal achieved, you unlock new tools that you either need to complete future deliveries or that you can use to improve your existing factories. That's right, once you've completed a delivery, you may not always dismantle the factory to make some space, the game also accepts deliveries of other shapes that you can spend to unlock upgrades such as faster belts, faster cutters, faster extractors, etc. Those upgrades will be important if you want to achieve the last few deliveries asking for thousands of complex shapes in a timely manner.
Quickly after unlocking the first few levels, the game will ask you to start painting, cutting and reassembling shapes. As the number of shapes required increases, you'll want to optimize your factories, duplicate parts of it and re-arrange how a shape is produced in order to get to the goal faster. You will also need to spread out into the seemingly infinite plane of random shapes and colors. Then you'll need to figure out how to combine all the belts to deliver those shapes built far away.
There's always something to do in the game, when you're not building a new factory, you're optimizing an existing factory, all with the goal of unlocking new levels or upgrades.
The game comes with 26 levels with predefined shapes and an infinite number of randomized shapes after that if you still want more or if you want to use the tools unlocked near the end that allows you to automate parts or even the whole factory. There are a couple of tricky shapes within those 26 levels that will surely test your engineering skills.
I had a great time with the game. There's a free demo playable in your browser if you just want to try it. The game is available on PC.
There is also a puzzle focused DLC that I'd love to try at some point.