shapez.io is a game about building factories to automate the creation and combination of increasingly complex shapes within an infinite map
An open-source Factorio-like game, unique enough to stand on its own.
I wrote a review of the game on GOG.com, giving the game 5/5 stars, and I'm just gonna copy it to here (though in hindsight this might be too spoiler-y?):
If you like Factorio, I'd recommend playing this and sticking through past the end of the campaign.
The campaign itself is a linear progression where you produce and deliver increasingly more complex "shapes" to the main hub. There are no survival elements and no character to play as: this does make Shapez more shallow in a sense, but also it can be nice to just focus on building factories without distractions and inconveniences. The only action that consumes any kind of currency is copying and pasting, but that currency can be produced relatively easily. All-in-all, pretty addicting, but might feel like "lesser Factorio" to some.
The post-game is where Shapez really shines. Throughout the game you unlock various logic gates and wiring components - things that are present in Factorio, Minecraft etc. but usually are not given any real reason to exist. Here though, past the end of the campaign, the game starts demanding production of randomly-generated pieces - a task that's tedious to do by hand, but is a perfect excuse to build a computerized Make-Anything-Machine! This alone provides enough depth to the game to warrant 5 stars IMO, there's just no reason to build anything like this in Factorio given that all recipes are known in advance.
In case you didn't read any of that, you can instead take a look at a timelapse of me building an overengineered Make-Anything-Machine (and demolishing some obsolete factory components in the process):
(This build could've been much, much smaller, but I really wanted my Make-Anything Machine to have a throughput of 4 conveyor belts, even though I did not stick around to reach the level where this throughput is actually required.)
High-resolution screenshots:
There is no structure here because I barely know how to play yet
Zone 0 is demolished and replaced with some structured builds, but they're still all over the place
The Main Bus.
The Main Bus continues.
The start of the Make-Anything-Machine
Anyway, you can tell I really enjoyed playing this. *9/10*
As you can see, shapez.io factories grow very big over time. So don't be fooled by the minimalist graphics and simple components: the game will easily take up 100% of a CPU core. It doesn't help that the game is written as a web app, and is single-threaded. What's interesting is you can go into the settings and change the clock speed of the game: by default the game logic updates at 60 Hz, you can set it to 30 Hz, which doubles the performance but makes things like conveyor belts less precise, or something like that. Anyway, by the time I finished playing I had to set the game update speed to the slowest possible, and my CPU still couldn't keep up. Not great. But hey, at least web apps are portable, so the game runs on Linux or whatever else you want.
Game finished 2023-06-11
gardenapple - 2023-06-30
