Recent reviews by Darkie

This game has the best ratio between the amount of fun you'll have with the fewest amount of buttons. I've never played anything this deep with literally just WSAD and Space. Also, 5€ full price for this? What a bargain. I get that it's a simple game, but come on. Give yourselves some credit, devs. And thanks for the full ultrawide support, although I would prefer a third option to solid and transparent black bars, which would be no black bars, but that's a massive nitpick.

EDIT: Ooooooh! That's how they make money! They have DLCs, so the whole game is actually 20€ if you want everything. That makes way more sense. Still too cheap though, because from what I've tried from the DLCs so far, they are very good and definitely worth the asking price.

I'm generally not a fan of these level-based logistics games. I like to have just one map and build forever, but I can live with it if they're really good. This one has just not gripped me. The types of challenges that it has are not interesting and not very intuitive. I also don't really like that you're not really managing trains, just connecting stations and everything else is automatic. It just wasn't able to hold my attention despite being the type of game I usually like.

I always hated card games. Then I played Inscryption and realized there are exceptions to my card game hating rule. Now there's two exceptions. This is like Inscryption's Kaycee's mod but on steroids and poker-based. Really cool, definitely deserves all the awards it got..

I think I need to try Slay The Spire. Maybe I don't hate card games...

Incredibly unique game. I played Inscryption before The Hex and I think I liked Inscryption better, because the actual card game was really fun and there was a lot of replayabilty especially with Kaycee's mod, but all that means is that Daniel Mullins in my eyes is getting better since Inscryption is newer. The Hex is awesome. Really weird trip, really cool, interesting lore to dive into on youtube videos since I'm too dumb to explore it properly myself.

FACTORY MUST GROW!

I don't get the hype around this game. I feel like the longer I play it, the worse I am at it. It's just not fun and it's not satisfying to score because it's usually either just lucky or you're one of the few people that know how to control the puck and that's never going to be me, because I'm done with this piece of garbage game.

The game is fine, I don't have any major issues with it, but it's just too simplistic, gets very repetitive after a while and it just didn't give me enough new content to keep me interested. At first I was trying to finish all levels with 3 stars but once I found out that it just makes the levels too tedious, I quickly decided to just finish them without the extra objectives, but even then I got bored really quickly. Also if the game was actually challenging, it might be interesting, but sometimes you just get bad RNG and there's no way to finish the level in time with all the objectives finished. Also I crashed a few trains because the UI is not very responsive and it didn't react to me clicking a train to stop it. Every once in a while you get a new game mechanic but it's never anything interesting. It's stuff like a very slow train going through a pre-set path, which is nothing interesting, just annoying. I'm actually surprised I got this far, because some levels I failed just because I was so bored I stopped paying attention.

Really good game and a decent improvement over the first installment, but it's not perfect.

People that are not big fans of these factory-style games will probably find the massive amount of shapes pretty overwhelming even before they unlock all research to actually try out all the features, but that's fine, it's not a genre for everyone.

I love factory games, so bring on all the shapes you can throw at me.... Except there's a problem for us megabase maniacs too. Once you get to a certain base size, the game starts glitching.

Where Factorio would start dropping FPS below 60 and just run slow, Shapez 2 instead keeps the framerate high but drops certain actions, so you'll find out that your belts are not fully saturated, because a part of your factory stopped working or slowed down to a crawl due to the operations limit. I found out that the buildings most likely to glitch out like that are the belt launchers pointed at big belts. They just suddenly stop throwing stuff on the belt at maximum possible speed even though the belt is completely empty.

I will admit that I started the game without the platform limit as I felt like that limit was only taking the fun away, when I played with it in the demo. All it did was that you had to wait to get more currency to build more platforms, but it didn't actually add any challenge. That means my bases are probably a little bit bigger than they would be for an average player and that likely makes this annoying glitch more likely to appear earlier than with a regular playthrough. Although I did delete every single building I didn't need anymore and only kept making the "Operator Shapes" that give out research points, so if you don't delete your old factories (which I believe still give you currency), you might run into that issue early as well.

The game is in early access and it came out less than a week ago, so I'm hoping this will get fixed in the future. Also it's pretty much the only problem I ran into, otherwise it's been great. Blueprints and copying modular plans is a little bit tedious and belts and especially pipes very often don't connect to what they should connect to, when pasting identical blueprints, but it's something I got used to and doesn't bother me that much.

Oh yeah and one more tiny thing, grey is too similar to white, so I had to re-do a full mini factory, because I didn't realize one part of the shape combines all 3 colors into white and it's not just grey. Tiny problem though, just a bit annoying at the time. But maybe include both grey and white in the first shape you introduce that has white in it, so that people notice the contrast between them. Again, tiny issue, simple fix.

I might sound negative, but apart from those minor issues, the game is great.

Trains are awesome.

Conveyor belts go brrrrrr!

Factory must grow.

Shapes need to be shaped.

I always loved short & sweet games and this is one of the better ones. Not much to add. Visually it's among the best thanks to photo-realism provided by UE. The soundtrack is great, my favorite part is in the last boss fight. The story is good, nice little Nordic fairytale. The gameplay is good enough and definitely accessible for beginners, but nothing major I haven't seen before.

Technical side is good, but not amazing. The game is under 5 hours long and yet I've ran into 3 bugs where I had to reload my save.

The ultrawide support is officially non-existent, because it would mess up the artistic vision, so we get black bars. What art. UUU removes the black bars, but doesn't fix vertical scaling in cutscenes and even some gameplay scenes even when I added a line into the config file to enforce proper scaling. Get with the times, devs. UW is the future, ESPECIALLY for cinematic games like yours.

I kinda hate this whole binary rating system, because I feel like I'm just giving everything a positive rating unless it's really bad. I think this will be an exception.

The game is like 6/10. Nothing terrible. It's very pretty, it has an interesting world and the characters are ok. Unfortunately the puzzles are not super inventive and almost none of them actually require any critical thinking, just looking around to find that one mcguffin you need to advance to the next part of the map. I can't say I had a ton of fun playing the game, it was just ok. I'm fine with either good gameplay or good story/characters. Both of those were mediocre in this game.

I would have probably left the review at positive, but what put me over the edge was the technical side.

I didn't have any issues with overall performance, but I did have some stuttering a few times, then I had an elevator completely disappear once, so I was running around trying to figure out what to do only to discover that I needed to reload to see an elevator that can take me upstairs. I also got stuck twice while crawling through a narrow passage, so another two reloads. The game has black bars in cutscenes in ultrawide, which is just completely pointless since there is a utility that removes those bars and nothing looked weird with them gone even in super-ultrawide with increased FOV, so there's no reason to have them in the first place. Devs really need to start at least giving us the option to disable them. The Last of Us has this option and just warns you that some things might not look ideal or might be framed awkwardly. Give us that option. Also, ALWAYS add a proper FOV slider that has correct scaling for UW monitors. So yeah, the technical part just barely pushes me into the negative territory. At least it was short, and I do like short and sweet games, but when being short works to a game's benefit, it's probably not an amazing game.