Recent reviews by Dewin

0/10 forgot to eat, sleep, or do my taxes. Would not recommend.

The real review: I am a fan of factory and automation games as a genre and absolutely loved the original Shapez, so I picked this up without any hesitation when it came out.

The original Shapez and this sequel distill the concept of automation and factory games down to its purest and most abstract form. There's no needing to look up or memorize recipes for every product when every recipe is naturally intuitive (need half a circle? Cut a circle in half!). Instead, it becomes a matter of how can you quickly and efficiently build factories to do whatever transformations you need (and those transformations themselves become increasingly complex as you play the game.) Every problem you face has multiple solutions.

Shapez2 departs from its predecessor by going 3D (which adds a surprising amount of depth to the game, no pun intended), where all of your factories are built on islands in space connected by belts, pipes, and/or trains. These islands come in a small variety of shapes that you can build, which ultimately leans towards you building your own reuseable machines (in the form of blueprints). This is my "Mine a bunch of shapes and put them on a space belt" machine blueprint, which goes to my "Cut all the shapes in half, then rotate one half so the two outputs are facing the same way" machine, and so on. In a electronics engineering perspective, you can think of the machines the game provides you as circuitry components (transistors and such) and then the islands themselves are (primitive) microprocessors.

I backed this when it was a Kickstarter, under the old working title "Echoes of Eridu". Didn't play it too much then, but it has been in my stable of games for when I was in the mood for a platformer.

Recently dusted it off and gave it a go now that it's released. A+ would be terrible at this game again.

Finally convinced my wife to play it with me. A+++++ would be terrible at this game with my wife again.

Satisfies my need for couch multiplayer that's actually fun with just two players.

One observation: It doesn't feel like there's any adjustment to difficulty (save for maybe boss HP) based on the number of players -- so it felt easier -- though not TOO much easier -- with two people. Of course, fiendishly difficult platforming sections aren't any easier when you both have to do them.