Shore Siege!

Shore Siege is a simple game by Antony Lavelle, the designer behind the SHIFT series of games. While entirely unlike SHIFT, Shore Siege does share several of SHIFT's traits -- it's simple, easy to learn, doesn't take too long, and has enough cleverness to make for an entertaining play.

At first glance, Shore Siege seems to be your typical (side-view) survival shooter game -- your pirate ship is beached on the shore and under attack from a bizarre variety of critters, and you have to kill them to save your ship. However, the mechanics of the gameplay are not your simple "click mouse to shoot zombie" (or whatever else, but let's be honest, it's nearly always zombies) that you see in your ordinary survival shooter game. Rather, you have a truly silly assortment of weaponry, but each weapon in your arsenal is only effective against one or two types of enemy, and each weapon is used differently (some you click and drag onto the enemy, some you just click, some you have to hold over the enemy, etc.) At the end of the day, you can buy the usual array of upgrades to your weapons, and buy repairs for your ship; if you get it repaired enough, you can sail away from the island and win the game.

Anyway, the game is neither overly complicated, overly difficult, or overly long. The balance is not quite right; you'll discover that one of the upgrade strategies is clearly the most powerful, so once you find that out you should be able to win pretty easily and quickly. The graphics are pretty cute; the music is also nice, though (as is pretty much always the case) pretty repetitive. The sound effects are pretty basic, but they get the job done. One complaint is that one of the weapons (the magnet) was not at all intuitive to use; I didn't actually figure it out at all the first time I beat the game, but only when writing this review.

Overall, Shore Siege is a nice little diversion. Like the SHIFT series, it doesn't overstay its welcome; it doesn't bore you with 50 levels of nearly the same thing, but rather gets you through the game in a reasonable amount of time while remaining fun all the way through. It's not a game you feel the need to go back and play again and again, but I definitely enjoyed playing through it.