Man, I love Zachtronic games. I can't get enough of them, wish I own all of those. I was saddened to see the developer taking the cap out permanently. But their influences live on, so do other base building. This proved there's always a way to distinguish yourself from the rest.
And by this, a sequel to a relative successful game; Shapez 2. This should be released for mobile phones, an ASUS ROG could run this fine. My GPU does 120FPS on the highest of settings. Better yet, it is smooth in performance. Robust, intuitive, symmetrical, asymmetrical, like implementation is good enough to make any construction methods work overall.
Think of it as a 3D spreadsheet and Blender program mashed together, except a lot of it involves geometrical and logistical constructs of industrialized disassembly and manufacturing before sending the final packages through some portal. It is super simple to get in concept.
The main menu has a predesigned area where it showcases what is possible, especially working on various renditions of discs with every vinyl and color options possible. Modes to pick from now is certification, full factory with 4 difficulty and 1 custom settings that are instead locked.
You've also noticed I got a supporter edition, those rail loops playing in the background? Yeah, that's what the upgraded version comes with. Understandably, I sound like I'm promoting a game, if anything, I'm promoting things I wish I got my hands on early game. But no, those are locked behind progression too, and will take hours of brain-exercising work to get there. So let me get to it.
Installing extractors on the circle discs before installing their pathways with respective anchors allow every single of those four quadrant discs to be transported. Notice the exclamation sign, that's because I didn't rotate them to the right direction, just doing once immediately let me place the rest.
Turns out, if I wasn't paying attention, I can set up a pathway that moves the opposite direction and that same error can pop up. Easy to rectify in small cases, but if you're like hyper aggressive about this later game, yeah it could get tricky unless you've mastered cleverly using inputs pressing Shift+LMB to drag a box across pathways and then readjust or something like that.
I wish I knew, even in its early access state. Yet there are other things possible to do like saving up blueprints of structures deployed and then highlighted by the drag box, copying and pasting them or cutting them out to place em elsewhere. Undo, Redo action. Even rotating, and mirroring them. These are going to be important for productivity reasons, making things so easier. Because god knows, I have to deal with cerebral overload and my eyes start to hurt scrutinizing everything around.
Ask yourself why you should play this game? Do you like building things? Fancy working in civil engineering? Maybe you're curious to know how all that works. This game is too futuristic to reflect on modern capabilities of stuff like this. But nonetheless, for the dopamine, it gets right through.
More challenging are the Milestone tasks, they will diversify, and instead of just cutting, I had to stack as well. Items get turned, stacked on top of one another for a new designated shape before delivered to complete these tasks, and they take their time. In the midst, I just peruse the task menus and more, and see if I can make more blueprints to use as well. Turns out, I'm far from being done.
Finishing these simple tasks net you research points, though, judging by how it works, it expects you to complete most of them sooner, just like your mock tests at school. Also, a little too simple to unlock many useful things, like a Swapper or Cutter that instead separates, not remove other blocks.
If you're not a fan of that, it is the way it is. I kind of hoping there's more incentive, but yeah, tough cookies. Upgrades and features unlocked will make so much of this easier, including the use of a 3rd floor, which costs 50RP. That one will take 10hrs for me to do, and don't ask me why, each hour is like a whole day, that's how much brain power was going into setting all of this.
Why should I keep going? Well, remember the main menu screen? I reached the 3rd stage, and factory normal was about to be unlocked. But this meant transitioning my game to that mode from certification. Which changes things. In fact, all this isn't accessible until I've progressed far enough to build rails and bridges to access those. See? It is kind of like SimCity....ok maybe not.
After finishing my 3rd stage, boy we finally got in business. I also realized the center vortex has 12 openings, not 4. Allowing me to connect the other extractable chips everywhere else. Honestly, this whole thing now seems more interesting because I can build trains collecting multiple stacks simultaneously, before entering the vortex portal for delivery.
You know what, this game is good for presentations, I guess. Maybe you can emulate something like this, show it to your board of directors, lure in your employees with a hyperfunction industrial system created by multiple humans to mass transport products on and on.
Actually, I don't know what any of that meant, but this was fun. If it wasn't insulting my intelligence and attention-span. I'm being serious by saying that we need more games like this. Not the mindless stuff they hash out every single day, my brain has turned into mush playing those.
