ShapeHero Factory Steam Charts & Stats

Amazing game. I would easily recommend this to anyone who likes the satisfactory style planning and building. However, if you played something like those games and found them a little boring in the middle perhaps, this game is a good alternative. Rather than just building to build more to build more, in this game you build units to battle your enemies and defend your core every round in a roguelike fashion. I still highly recommend it but some feedback as of the time of this review on features or improvements I think would really help this game out. 1. A control Z function would be really nice in case you remodeled and realized half way something didn't work out but now you need to put it all back. 2. Either less heavy scaling on infinite mode (I often lose HARD within 3-4 fights after beating the final boss even if I crushed him) or more rooms per floor to get access to the higher tier of units more reliably (even with infinite mode its rather difficult). Adding a 4th phase would also work but we already have infinite mode so idk if that's a good idea or not. 3. The ability to set target priorities on a unit to unit basis. I have lost so many rounds because my units will just ignore nearby enemies or bosses to funnel 30 charging units at a small enemy at the very edge of the map where 1 of them would have killed it. I would suggest weakest, strongest, closest, farthest settings at the very least and maybe elite/boss but strongest might cover that. 4. Smart targeting so your units do not massively over commit to a single enemy when 1-3 would have killed it and now your next 20 units are in a line running to the edge of the screen doing nothing. This is similar to watching a roomba show up and having 3 .50 cal machine gun nests open up on it when a wave of zombies is just to the right of it but they wont stop firing at the roomba until they need to reload. That's about all I have for now. I do want to state again: I think this game is an amazing concept. I am going to keep playing it for a long time just to try out stuff, min max things etc and it looks like more updates are on the way so I am willing to wait for them.

A cutesy little factory builder. The strengths are a lighthearted roguelike experience unique in automation games: when you can get a random research tree that gives you 20% extra products whenever you make a The main weakness is a lack of enemy variety. There's around two dozen unique craftable units and spells, but since nearly all enemies act the same, there's no impetus to choose different builds. Also, enemy levels are unrelated, so you never feel the need to adjust your build to compensate for upcoming threats. Still, it's easy to criticize a game with a completely unique gameflow for not having perfected it yet. A charming casual experience for sickos that like Shapez and Factorio.

If you love Factory Games, Drafting, Rougelite Progression, Skill Trees, Tower Defense, and Cutesy animations, you'll appreciate this game. This is a very clever and original blend of much loved mechanics from an eclectic set of genres and scratches several itches for me in a very accessible package. The game feels polished enough to play as a full game, despite early access status. Future enhancements will just be a nice bonus. The game cycles between a preparation phase and a tower defense. In the preparation phase you build factories that put parts together into warriors. In the battle phase those warriors self-deploy and hold off waves of enemies. They protect the crystal they deploy from. If it's health is depleted, game over. A timer during production encourages you to build as many warriors as possible in a short space of time, but you can pause the countdown while you build the factory. After each battle you progress down a "choose your path / choose your reward" map. As you go you keep the factory and add more parts and processes as you unlock new warriors and research new factory improvements. The available research is broken into mini trees offered to you as randomized as draft choices. Rather than building the research points as in other factory games, you are awarded them for leveling up or as map or battle rewards. All of your factory time goes to mass producing the next best unit. The game mechanics help keep the factory building casual but still oriented toward problem solving and space management, and the limited resources and research options help keep the game fresh.

In general, the game has a very short lifespan. It's quite good at first, but doesn't have the staying power an automation game needs. First of all, it's a timed roguelite with limited progression outside each particular run. This tends to run counter to the usual controlled progress most players engage with when playing factory games. I have no problem with the timer, but there are problems elsewhere that are made much worse by that timer. Firstly, due to the structure of the game and questionable balancing, this game honestly feels to me like it has no end game building. You get to mid level crafting and just as you're ready to do something really complex instead of just messy and sprawling, it's over. Infinite mode has been recently added, but the scaling is too aggressive. There are three stages with five rounds each. After you've beaten the third stage, you'll be lucky to beat another round. It ramps too fast! You don't have time to build resources to experiment with the highest level stuff. There is a whole tier of units you don't see because the game requires absolutely perfect play to even unlock them. And here comes my personal complaint about the game. The luck. The build process is reasonably engaging, and depending on what research chains appear during each run, it can go on interesting tangents. But the randomization and ability to make interesting decisions is very lacking. There is something wrong with the rng generator. It is extremely common to reroll choices or even restart runs and continuously keep getting the same choices. The reroll system can be extra infuriating when it gives you three choices, you reroll and the screen doesn't change. You spent the reroll, but you still have the exact same choices in the exact same positions. This happens a lot. Some of this is because certain research sets have very limited options, and some of those options are frankly terrible creating a limited but wildly painful variance within the groupings. On top of that, there is very little chance to change or control what researches are going to appear. The game divides them into 'basic' 'advanced' and 'general', but the balance of which researches are found where seems like it was chosen by blind dart throws. It would be vastly improved to see them split into 'Logistics' for anything dealing with belts and pipes. 'Resources' for anything that increases supply of the various sources or helps with map expansion/source movement. Production for the various processing tiles. And finally, 'Unique' for those researches that do something different to add new dynamics to the board. The difficulty is static, and reasonably high and for the most part, quite satisfying. But the more you play the worse the balance feels. You absolutely need good rolls to make progress at the high levels. Each run takes a solid investment of time and effort. Yes you have to know how to build your factory and make best use of the resources, but if you don't get certain high value researches, you're wasting your time. When you're seeking to beat those high difficulty runs, if you don't see something good right away, you're probably going to be restarting for awhile until a good set decides to actually appear. And unfortunately, there are only a handful of good options for the top difficulties. Replayability really suffers at that point. This game has been bouncing around on my playlist for awhile and while I really like the premise and the theming, it feels mostly correct. But it lands in that painful spot of 'This could be amazing, but it's not, there are Problems' and it feels like the game really wants to waste my time. Development is also slow, so if you're hoping to see some big changes to develop the game further, there's just no point to actively watching. Come back in a year and see if it's better. That's what I'm going to do, but until then... I don't recommend this.

I very cool idea. very charming. right now I run into a lot of balance issues and can't make it much past the 1st boss. I seem limited on time or resources to hit the throughputs I really need to make it very far,

Works perfectly on Linux. Excellent all around game mechanics, yes the devs need to find a better balancing act to give more reason to use the higher tier units, I think this can be done by introducing different difficulty levels for the run giving more or less boss trees to go through. Try the demo, these devs are worth supporting.

really good game ~ waiting for full release main issues on the game is mostly balance though - and its seems hard to balance since its a snowball type game some research things are just too weak - and also its a factory game with a timer, so getting some upgrades late means nothing since you really cant build around them - and you also cant overhaul the factory because of timer so maybe commit to the game having no pause or with pause - so the research items balance could be better -- like the inserter vs efficient delivery - like they're both comparable but inserter is so much faster to build a line - but some of the research items are straight up not worth the currency to set-up [spoiler]the starter units are strong enough to beat max ascension -- and the latter units don't give enough to justify how big their footprint on the factory (especially if no inserter tech or efficient delivery) and the initial investment to them --- if you're only going to output a two to three crafters worth (which can make you lose the round since that currency and time isn't used to produce the units that already have a set-up) -- so the only way feels like spam the early units first then once you have enough assets - you sell half your factory to make 6-9 crafters worth - but that's just too much work if the early units spam is enough -- yes the later units are really strong but the game just ends before you HAVE to transition out of early set of units and its a bit risky because you're holding capital and most units only function effectively once get some critical mass [/spoiler]

short procedural factory building you get enough time to make spaghetti but not enough that you end up having to untangle it and then you get tested regularly on how efficient your factory was with clear signs of what you lack instead of just abstract numbers that are hard to care about

I have ~3000 hrs across factorio, satisfactory, & dysons sphere program, and this is a great little factory game. Often with the large form factor games, you end up just repeating the same builds over and over again, but you just can't do that here. The puzzle is fundamentally different every time. You must build something from your box of scraps, but the roguelike elements keep you guessing on what tools you have and what you need to build next. The timer provides pressure to figure it out, but if it's too much and you really want to build that flawless picture, you can effectively turn it off. The game seems balanced for inefficient/messy builds at low ascension, so you'll be fine as long as you keep building. And when you finally hit that peak and build that greatest factory ever, it's done, go do it again but better. Great gameplay loop, great game. Some crashes on my laptop, but none on desktop.

Yes, it is indeed fun the first time playing it. But i cant recommend it, because its the same friggin lazy design done in the past 20 years of game development. - Design a bunch of interesting abilities - throw them all together indiscriminately into 1 pool - roll a dice and pick one to give the player afterthought: - design a bunch of thematic but utter useless or very very situational abilities - throw them all together into the pool - make progression unlocking all those abilities Its done for more than 20 years and for more than 20 years player complain about rng. - getting at start of run nothing that you could actually make use of for the first 3rd of the run - getting nothing but stuff that is only realy useable at the very end or past the run (endless) - getting nothing but the crap choices and "padding" (to "round ou" the pool, to increase pool size) abilities - getting heros right at start offered, that you cant build no matter what, until at least 2nd 3rd of run - the more you unlock, the more frustrating the game becomes. because the amount of crappy abilities or very very situational ones increases. decresing your chance of pulling usefull ones. I personally think this kind of game shouldnt be promoted. If you look arround right now, there are several (!) games that came out "recently", that do teh exact same crap. Its nothing new, its oldoldold dead horse beating old justified complains of players.