Factory friends and automation lovers, this is going to be – or already is – a hell of a year for the factory building genre. I know this because we’re not only getting Satisfactory 1.0, but also the massive game-doubling expansion Factorio: Space Age. I know this because the harbinger of that golden factory year arrived today in the form of early access for Shapez 2. In the short decade that factory building has evolved from half-baked ideas and fringe Minecraft mods to full-fledged simulations, we’ve seen some great games, but the future is looking increasingly bright.
Shapez 2 is a good example of how many more ideas lie dormant in the genre. It’s so different from the other two big factory games coming out this year (it’s also different from Foundry, another option that came out four months ago). While Factorio and Satisfactory embrace the survival genre and the idea of limited resources as a gameplay constraint – something that gives you that delicious friction and tension as you play – Shapez instead focuses on the inherent puzzle of arranging and connecting the machines that make up your factory. You can practically build as many machines, platforms, and as much workspace as you want, as the focus is instead on how your factory’s products take shape.
In a game like Factorio, you send a sheet of iron into a machine and out comes a perfectly shaped iron gear. It’s that simple. In Shapez, you pull a square out of the ground, but the product you need is a half-green square with half a square stacked on top. This means you need to set up machines for each step in the process: cut the squares in half with one machine, paint about a third of them by putting liquid paint in them with another machine, a third machine rotates the cut halves into the right orientation for a final row of machines, then stacks them into a half-green square with half a square on top.
That’s a very simple example of what Shapez 2 has to offer. More complex chains of machines are required for quick processing, and the raw shapes you get aren’t always as simple as a simple square. You’re cutting, separating, cutting again, recombining, mixing colors, stacking, raising with supports, stacking again, and filling raised sections with liquid crystals – and some of these results need to be achieved in the right order. Crystal sections, for example, shatter when dropped or cut in a later process.
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This will be familiar to most people who played the first Shapez. Shapes 2 adds a third dimension, meaning you can run conveyor belts and pipes and place machines at three heights above your factory floor. You can choose which sides of a factory segment – what Shapez calls a space platform – the raw materials go in and the products go out, and then chain your platforms together to form a connected series of machines that do specific jobs.
In other factory games, you have to place machines that produce products: in Shapez, you have to design the inner workings of the machines yourself.
What makes Shapez so cool, too, is that once you’ve developed a process in a way you really like, you can simply copy the entire platform and reuse it in the future when you need the same process. It emphasizes the thinking and discovery phase of the automation process and reduces the time you have to spend repeatedly dealing with a problem you’ve already solved.
You’ll then run large conveyor belts between factory segments and train cars of finished goods or raw materials to either move them to the next step or drop them into the vortex at the center where you’ll deliver finished orders. There’s even a very satisfying upgrade where you can drop entire trains of finished goods directly into the vortex.
One of the big tasks for endgame Factorio players is building a megabase, often to an arbitrarily high number. It’s a really interesting task if you’re managing the balance between size and expansion, but it’s tedious at times, meaning only a few truly dedicated people with lots of free time can get into it. Shapez 2 on the easiest difficulty reduces this megabase building experience to something that, while less complex, can be digested in 20-30 hours. You experience the fun and excitement of large, independent factory segments combining products into massive quantities to achieve big goals. Is it a lesser version of the same exhilaration? Probably, but you didn’t spend 1,000 hours getting there.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing! The reason I say this is such a good year for factory games is because we have three very different experiences. One, Shapez 2, is about the pure logic of building and scaling automated systems. Another, Satisfactory, is about being anchored and wandering around a single place that you can change and shape by building bigger, better things. The third, Factorio: Space Age, is about complex interactions between the pressures of limited resources and the constraints of physics.
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Also, I can make this clear distinction because Shapez 2 isn’t even fully released yet. The 30 hours of fun you can have with it in Early Access feels like its own complete game, and the developers make it clear that they’re planning several major updates that will add more features and more content during the at least six months they plan to keep it in Early Access.
This genre has exploded into existence over the past decade, but it’s clear to me that 2024 will be remembered as a record year for factory and automation games because we’re finally really unlocking their true potential.
