Shores Unknown

DO NOT PURCHASE: the games development is practically nonexistent due to the war in ukraine. Consider the game dead as of the time of review.

I have been playing games since 1982 and have played a lot! Not put in a lot of time on this one yet but, so far, my initial impressions are very positive. The devs seem to have done a very good job with getting right all the basics that make a good game. The unique combat mechanics in particular are great, making for some really good and, if you want, fast paced turn based engagements. I am a big fan of turn based games but I have not seen such good mechanics employed like this before. One of the stand out things is the lack of grid, which for me, tars and feathers many TB games and kills the immersion and often beautiful backgrounds (like For the King II! Which has a 2x4 grid!? I mean WTF!? You think our brains our so small we cannot visualise 2x4?!). Also artstyle here is great. Graphics are beautiful. And it even has a nice story with cutscenes and some voiceover. Sound, music... also all great. Just all good. I read that this game may be abandoned because it has not had updates in like 3 years because of war in Ukraine. However, I had my eye on it for a while, and could not wait any longer, so took a punt, to explore what is here and hoping the devs will come back to finis…

No updates for 3 years. Dead game.

The story is fine, the graphics are fine (for what the creators intended), the combat is garbage. Getting skill and gear "upgrades" isn't much of an issue, but the AI and initiative makes combat a crap shoot. You have to lock in your choice of actions before each round, such as character A needs to attack hostile X, so on and so forth. The problem lies when an action happens to get in the way, say if a hero goes down because your locked in decision for a character to heal another is overridden because a hostile engages the healing character and it instead chooses to counterattack. You have to lock in your choices at the start of a round but cannot ultimately control your characters actions, the AI is horrible at mid-combat response when you have no input at all because you made your decisions before the round started. It's just a crap shoot and not worth the frustration.

Will it be updated? i mean its 2 years already?

Shores of Unknown is a promising game that was unfortunately abandoned by its developers.