Shoresy: Legends of the North Review – Chuck ‘Er in the Trash

Shoresy: Legends of the North Review

Hockey games have been part of my life since the mid-1990s. So I’d like to think I know what a great arcade hockey game should be. Give me a stick, a puck, a few of the fellas, and make me feel like I’m living out all of my broken dreams. Shoresy: Legends of the North, which I’ll refer to as SLN from here on, clearly aims for that kind of experience. Instead, it feels like a prize pulled from a cereal box. And after a week on the ice, I can safely say the show deserved a much better tribute.

SLN’s first impression isn’t a good one. Static images fill the screen, while the menus look ripped straight from an early-2000s Flash game website. Apparently, twenty years of technological progress never made it to Sudbury.

Your first task is to create a player. The character creator is basic, but it does offer enough options to make your skater stand out from the roster. It’s a small touch, but one worth appreciating.

Don’t Trip

Developer Treewood Games has built SLN around the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs, the fictional senior team from the Letterkenny series starring Jared Keeso. On paper, Story Mode gets the presentation right. You travel between towns, face new opponents, and unlock gear along the way. The narrative mostly works, as you and the boys work to conquer the legendary Hockey Godz. It’s nothing special, but I was at least curious enough to find out how it all ended. The dialogue helps, too. Fans of the show’s humor will find plenty to enjoy, with chirps that capture the series’ crude, rapid-fire wit.

Unfortunately, those jokes (and everything else, for that matter) are buried beneath an excruciating number of loading screens. Everything you do requires SLN to load. Want to practice? Load. Want to edit your stats? Load. Want to have a two-second conversation? Load. It’s unfathomable that a game that looks this bad needs to load this much. As such, the pacing is dreadful, sucking the energy out of every stop along the way.

Get Off the Ice

But it’s the on-ice action where SLN completely loses me. It takes cues from arcade classics like NHL Rock the Rink, but never comes close to feeling as good. Shooting and skating are both tied to the same stick, meaning setting up a scoring chance often sends your skater somewhere you never intended. Players also continue gliding in the direction they face, making sharp turns feel like steering a shopping cart on ice. The whole thing is a sloppy mess that fights you at every opportunity.

The goalies make matters worse. Scoring against them is ridiculously easy, leaving games bereft of any real challenge. I never felt the tension of a close game because no netminder seemed able to stop me. Without a challenge, goals lose their impact, and celebrations feel hollow. It just isn’t all that fun to win every game by 10 goals.

Fundamentally Unfun

A few ideas do land. Fights can break out, and knocking an opponent unconscious leaves him sprawled on the ice while the game continues around him. It’s absurd, but it genuinely made me laugh, and Shoresy himself would surely approve. Power pickups also add some variety, including one that boosts skating speed and another that turns your goalie into a brick wall. They can swing a close game, but they can’t save a title that’s fundamentally unfun. The official description also promises local multiplayer through Shinny Mode, featuring fan-favorite characters you can draft. Perhaps a game with friends would improve things, but I find it hard to believe you’ll ever have somebody willing to play this with you.

Shoresy: Legends of the North is a bare-bones package that I couldn’t even recommend to the most devoted fans of the series. The writing might appeal to them, but those laughs are trapped inside a horribly dull, clunky experience. I wanted to love this game. The show is hilarious, and it deserves a proper adaptation. Instead, I spent the last week begging for it to be over. The Charlestown Chiefs from Slap Shot played smarter, rougher hockey than anything I found here, and they managed it back in 1977. And they did it with half the loading screens, too.

***A PS5 code was provided for this review***