Brighter Shores review: Clicker masterpiece, combat misfire (Early Access)

For whoever has even a surface-level acquaintance with RuneScape, that will be the measuring stick for Brighter Shores. Before we even draw the parallel, it's apparent from its shared DNA. Brighter Shores comes from Andrew Gower, one of the leading craftsmen in the making of Runescape. Naturally, the game feels an improvement over the classic OSRS formula in many ways — while simultaneously being worse in other ways.

Before we jump into our review, we should point out that Brighter Shores is still in Early Access, so some of our qualms will get ironed out in due course. In its very first week, the Gower brothers have been expedient in addressing player feedback, so the final product will almost decidedly be better than what we see now.

Brighter Shores is a grid-based retreat for grind enthusiasts

Brighter Shores seems visually very unique at the outset. Think ye olde fantasy MMORPG setpiece, except every room is a grid-based tile. Many have likened it to exploring OSRS but with a single-room draw distance, which is an authentic representation of how it plays in practice.

For some, this will be too disorienting of a whiplash; for others, it's a welcome evocation of a tabletop kit. For me, it was something I was neutral about, and got used to within an hour of playtime. This hit-or-miss element is a good catch-all for a lot of the game.

Brighter Shores is tailored for a very specific type of player — if you don't like the idea of grinding a skill for its own sake, this game is probably not for you.

The basic gameplay loop for Brighter Shores is this: click on the ground to move to someplace on this tile or another, then click an object of interest to advance a skill (Profession) related to it, and possibly harvest said object. Mechanically, there's nothing else to Brighter Shores — which, you could argue, is the case with downtime between combat in almost any MMORPG.

The problem is that there's nothing mechanically challenging in the combat uptime either. This is the main problem area for Brighter Shores in its current Early Access iteration, so let's talk about this first.

That is SIR combat to you, private!

Combat is very rudimentary, both a pro and a con depending on perspective (Image via Fen Research Limited)

Combat is the area where most (if not all) of Brighter Shores' questionable design choices concentrate. You can treat it like any other skill, except it's your actual job as ordained by the game's plot.

You begin the game as a new recruit to the local Guard encampment, and this becomes your first Combat Profession: Guard. You train Guard by hitting and defeating stuff — something to be said about police brutality here — and thus become marginally more able to hit stuff of higher levels.

Combat encounters are always one-on-one. You cannot pull mobs to farm them together. It's not turn-based, but you and the challenged foe anyhow take turns to trade hits. Hit points are fixed based on levels, damage dealt is RNG within set damage ceilings, and that's about it.

All your tactical options during combat are: swapping between one of three weapons, popping a potion, and later on some special attacks that are essentially the same between the three classes. The other option is moving, which interrupts your attack animation, and does not let you dodge enemy swings by physically moving out of ther implied range (with a handful of few exceptions where it becomes a boss mechanic).

With my time, there's only a couple of advanced tricks that Brighter Shores let me do to min-max combat with human skill: starting combat from range to get some free hits off on melee enemies (it's a detriment against ranged enemies), timing my potion to be right after my attack animation ends to save some time, and moving out of the way from AoE boss attacks.

Other than this, it's a numbers game. The finer details of this numbers game involves damage element types, which ties into its three classes: each strong in one element, but weak in another. This forms a rock-paper-scissors power dynamic.

Another jarring choice is gearing up for combat. Every episode, there's a soft reset to Level 0, as you have to train an episode-exclusive Combat Profession (Scout in Episode 2, Minefighter in Episode 3, and so on). The developers say it helps in not gating by combat level, but in that process, the overaching sense of progression is lost. You don't even get to keep the same gear for your new area, because Episode 1 gear is only effective for Episode 1 encounters.

On the flip side, the combat does retain a tag of casual-friendly simplicity that has some merit. However, for a Gower brothers game to feel like a downgrade from classic RuneScape in 2024 makes for a very bittersweet aspect.

Tackling the Premium Pass, and why it's reasonable enough

Although it shouldn't hamper our general review of the game, it's necessary to address premium features in live-service games. Brighter Shores has its monthly subs (which are somehow costlier if you buy yearly or quarterly bundles), and it's the price of admission beyond Episode 2.

For an Early Access game in its current state, though, some would call $5.99 a big ask. However, Brighter Shores lets you play out the first two Episodes fully till you are forced to shell out real money, and that's long enough to let you make up your mind.

Only the dedicated fans of Gower's offerings will pay for it beyond their first romp through the two Episodes it unlocks. This works out as intended: an avenue to support the admittedly small development team.

The well-polished core of Brighter Shores, and all the things it does right

Combat forms just four of this games' 18 Professions in Early Access. All 14 of the others retain a commendable degree of polish and provide a reasonable progression curve.

With 500 levels of grind, each of these are a marathon, not a race. Some of these fall under the same categories (Gathering is the same as Foraging), but others are more advanced in their implementation (such as Detective work).

They also tend to complement each other laterally, sometimes across Episodes. The berries you pick up from Hopeforest can be used to make Apprentice-level potions in the first town, and the potions concocted here remain utility throughout the game.

I, too, like being a fry cook (Image via Fen Research Limited)

There's not as many cross-Profession synergies as I had hoped when I found out about this, but the current Early Access iteration is already decent. Another stroke of genius design is the Knowledge mechanic. Every Profession you actively train also adds to another progression meter called Knowledge, which gives you a Knowledge Point upon completion.

With these, you can unlock specific AFK-farming activities, or consume it to get a flat amount of XP towards any lvl 20+ Profession. There's bound to be a few Professions you won't like actively farming, so this is a great avenue of lateral entry into the especially grindy post-20 levels.

Brighter Shores is no paragon of visual feats, but its minimalist art direction is cohesive and charming in its own way. It has the obvious OSRS vibes, but the closest thing I could find to compare it to was Sims 3. While very PS3-era, the visuals and quality of animation are good enough for immersion.

That's a good segue to talk about another thing this game does well: feel lifelike. Brighter Shores utilizes all of its assets well to make its world feel lived-in. Many of the NPCs brandish the tongue-in-cheek trademark Andrew Gower humor, so it's also a welcome rug for RuneScape fans to settle down on.

The technical provisions allowed by loading in only one room at a time lets the game create a further layer of liveliness, as other players huddle around the Profession hubs. This creates a natural environment to try out your MMORPG banter (within restraints, as the chat filter is very strict).

This is in reference to things that make sense in Brighter Shores (Image via Fen Research Limited)

To be nitpicky, there's an unfortunate number of questionable minutiae to be found throughout the game, but those nitpicks might as well be goofy encounters that add to the game's pros.

The fact that goblin chiefs are loitering in one corner of the town perimeters while the high-ranking Guard posted there is perched on a nearby tower to order an ungodly amount of takeout servings is just as funny as it's nonsensical.

The verdict: Multiplayer features and the future

Overall, these plus points lay down the foundations of a game that can go the mile to create a true-blue RuneScape successor. The road to that is a long one, though. The current version of Brighter Shores has precious few multiplayer features. Aside from combat, this is a big reason why disaffected RuneScape players won't want to migrate to Brighter Shores just yet.

Right now, you can add your friends in-game, and then immersively find them by learning their location and manually tracking them amongst the crowd. I didn't mind that there's no fancy sticker for the game to pre-identify my friend — but I mind the lack of multiplayer interactions I can have with them.

In-game, there's only two I found so far: co-op woodcutting and co-op fishing. Both of these give more XP than the single-player variant of the activity, but there's nothing more to it.

Admittedly, I haven't tried PvP or player-to-player trading yet. However, given the state of the combat, I doubt it will be anything special enough to instantly overturn my view that Brighter Shores is quite lacking in being a proper MMORPG. So far, it's mostly a single-player game with the MMO treadmills and uninspiring combat.

Before we go to the scoreboard, let us reiterate the Early Access tag. There's two glaring flaws I found in Brighter Shores as a MMORPG, but the game is otherwise good enough to warrant some hope for its future — which we're excited about.

Brighter Shores (Early Access)

A surprisingly well-polished traditional clicker MMORPG about grinding skills, leveling up, and doing side quests that might get out of RuneScape’s shadow and eke out its own territory — once it irons out the combat issues in Early Access, that is.

Reviewed on: PC

Release Date: November 6 (Early Access)

Developers/Publishers: Fen Research Limited

Edited by Abu Amjad Khan