Shape Sweeper

Somewhere between a roomba commercial and a resource spreadsheet lives Shape Sweeper. Code Sword’s 2025 incremental, published by Half Slice Studio, hands you an army of robotic vacuums called PolyBots with an insatiable appetite for geometry: circles, squares and triangles drift onto a top-down playfield, and your bots hoover them into currency. It is a merge game wearing a cleaning simulation as a skin, and the skin is doing a surprising amount of work.

What the loop feels like

The first scene is floor clutter. You purchase a few baseline PolyBots, drop them onto the board, and watch them wander after shapes, each one vacuuming at its own sluggish pace while the pile of uncollected geometry grows faster than the fleet can handle.

The second scene is the merge decision. Two identical bots, dragged together, become one faster, higher-capacity collector, and the question is whether to keep buying cheap bodies or to consolidate into a composite PolyBot that clears its lane with mathematical precision. You merge, the floor visibly empties faster, and the shape economy starts feeding your next purchase instead of embarrassing you. That’s Shape Sweeper.

How it actually works

The Merge Loop is the core: matching PolyBots combine on the board into tiered evolutions, scaling collection power faster than cluttering the floor with unmerged units. Vacuumed shapes convert straight into currency, which funds expansion and the tech tree, a structure of more than fifty distinct upgrades covering bot efficiency, shape spawn values, and automated quality-of-life. Speed upgrades are the trap the design sets for you: unbalanced speed means bots constantly bottlenecked returning to base or wasting trips on low-value debris, so the sensible split keeps capacity and shape-value multipliers growing alongside it. Early on the loop is active placement and merge oversight; once automation milestones unlock, it settles into a pure idle simulation where passive income and synergy do the heavy lifting, and you check in to collect and re-tier.

Where it stumbles

The ceiling is the honest complaint: this is a small indie release, and next to the genre’s heavy-hitters it lacks depth and content, with a very quiet community that makes strategy guides and endgame discussion nearly impossible to find. The novelty of vacuuming triangles is also doing real load-bearing work in the early hours. As a cheap, casual time-killer it functions fine; as a months-long commitment it runs out of floor.

Playing it today

It is a budget purchase on Steam for Windows from Code Sword and Half Slice Studio. If the merge loop is what hooked you, Slime Co. and Cookie Clicker scale the same compounding pleasure across far longer horizons.

The verdict

Shape Sweeper is a pleasantly odd trifle: robotic vacuums, geometry appetite, and a competent merge-and-tech-tree loop underneath. Enjoy the novelty while it lasts, and do not expect the endgame to reward you for staying.