Shape Idle review
4

It's an interesting concept where you have to pick and choose so you get the most out of what you have. It even gives you a wall of text masked as a tutorial when you start the game. In this game, you get shapes that makes.. other shapes? For the sake of convenience, I'll call the currencies "colors". You can then either upgrade the shapes directly, or upgrade the six slots that you are given. Each slot has its own speed, but currencies gained per second remains the same. The UI feels simple and really clean, and the shapes and colors do spin and you can see the progress on each slot. The music and sound is.. one of the music of all time. You'll probably want to turn them off if you plan to idle this game though. Oh, and it starts off really slow, but it ramps up a little bit through to the end-game.

There's also bonuses where if you get enough of one color, it'll give you a (mostly) useful bonus and it'll even make a ding sound for you. This ranges from slot boosts to shape boosts (which disappear once said shape is deleted) to just giving you more of the same color. Eventually, you'll see a "1" on the gem tab. That means you can trade in a color for another color. This is where it gets interesting, for better or for worse.

If you've been buying shapes, you might notice how it replaces the older and worse shapes of the same color. Now, imagine if you don't know whether or not this new color of shapes will replace the old colors or replace one of its own. This is where you can technically "softlock" yourself. There's no back-tracking, deleted shapes are forever gone, and if you ran out of shapes of a color without upgrading everything (like I did), godspeed to you because it'll likely catch you off guard. This game gives you the illusion of choose and pick for the best efficiency, but you don't even need trial and error, or even a strategy to continue playing. The good thing is, shapes of the same color will disappear automatically once you can't buy any more upgrades. It'll even change the background color if you even noticed it. Eventually, you'll hit the end where you unlock the fifth color and beat the game.

There's no prestige layer in this game. Well, technically one, but it's just a x2 to everything and start over. Repeat until you get the "sixth" color and reach the end. It's an exciting concept, but there's no way out of a softlock if you got yourself into one. There's no buying deleted shapes, they're forever gone, and the best case is just power through and wait longer, or just reset the game and start over. And by reset, I mean it without the multi. Overall, it took me a few hours (because of the bug), but I'd still recommend it nonetheless. It just lack things like re-buying smaller shapes.

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