Sentinel Reviews

I buy everything Matthew Brown puts out. Hasn't disappointed me yet. Nothing totally new about this game, but it does manage to turn what could be an annoying tower defense mechanic in other games into a much more entertaining puzzle than it rightly should be. The musical nuts and bolts holding this game together make it a must play. Be ready for a challenge.

This game is the rez of tower defense. Your tower placement affects the music (imagine the screen as one large step sequencer) as well as events like tower shots, dying enemies, etc. The gameplay is heavy in micromanagement. Most of the strategy involves shifting power between your towers according to enemy placement. I found it to be tedious. I'd rather play defense grid where I place or upgrade towers and forget about them. I barely played it, but I disliked the core gameplay mechanism. If you want a great game+music experience, play rez.

Sentinel is a tower defense game with a musical twist. Being a great fan of rhythm games, I was excited to discover it, and found the experience rather pleasant. This is my first tower defense game. It is not quite challenging, with most levels easy to pass on a few tries. Each level has a distinct feature of some sort, which is often reflected in the name (look for hints!). The bonus levels play on a single idea and are fun to pass. The game encourages you to complete the levels without losses for extra points, which are required to unlock further stages. As for the music, it contributes rather nicely to the overall experience. It does not affect the mechanics except on a few occasions, but it does add a pleasant sense of flow that is also backed with the visuals. The enemies appear and the towers fire in beat, and each event has its distinct sound. On earlier stages I played around with tower positions to create different musical patterns, but later in the game I had to concentrate mostly on beating the levels. All in all, Sentinel is a very enjoyable experience. I would place it somewhere between a game and a piece of visual art. If you appreciate rhythm as a part of gameplay, definitely give it a try.

Frustrating, but enjoyable. A tower defense based on the soundtrack. The puzzles in the game will drive you mad and keep you coming back. :)

I gave the tower defense/music game Sentinel another go today, and cleared a couple more levels, but it's really just not my thing. WAY too micromanage-y for my current level of patience, and some of the visual effects that are taking place in the background in time with the music are REALLY distracting (clearly, I am now officially "old"). Maybe I'll give it another try sometime in the future, but probably not…

While the style is very unique and the music is pretty cool...ultimately that's where the positives end. The gameplay is very boring, and the level progression goes from hard to impossible. There's a good idea somewhere in this game but the creators failed to design it very well.

An interesting take on the standard Tower Defense game. Your defense goes by the beat of the music, and the music changes according to your defenses, and how much power you divert between defenses. Very interesting and fun concept. For example, you don't really have any music playing without defense, or power running through it, but depending on the defense tower set, and how much power you have, the more interesting the music picks up. Keep in tune and in beat with the music to optimize your defenses. A good musical ear helps with planning (make good music) and timing your attacks/defenses (but don't be foolish with where you focus, power-wise), along with a good knowledge of strategy and patience for micromanaging (It's tower defense, it comes naturally). With good enough skill in micromanagment, a good tune might come out of the blue.

I am utterly in love with this game. The music is simply fantastic! (If you're into minimalistic electro/ house, that is.) So far, each stage has it's own colour pattern, looks, sound, and music. The variety has been overwhelming so far. One stage is Upbeat-House, while the next is relaxed Drum & Bass. I love it. The gameplay is really straight-forward and maybe not a huge game-changer. But the music-creation really adds that extra sense of "Oh god I just placed a new weapon!". Which is one of the best feelings in the game, together with gathering funds and destroying viruses. It's stressy, yet relaxing. If you're into electronic music and tower-defense games, I'd definitely recommend this!

What a great surprise was to find this game in last Autumn Sale'14! Tower defense genre, with a twist: the limited energy resource, that must be managed and relocated between the towers at all times. Besides that, the futuristic theme is eye candy, and there is an awesome electronic music (of a style i do not know how to determine precisely if it is minimal, house...) soundtrack. The game works like a kind of sound synthesizer, since each kind of tower makes a different sound. I like the difficulty, and is specially rewarding when your solution is correct and the remixed music sounds good!

It's a simple, tower-defense game, nothing game-changing. But it's still fun, challenging, and forgiving at the same time. Here's a quick look I did of the game. Feel free to skip around to get a general idea of the game and what you'll be getting into. Or you can simply read my summary below. http://youtu.be/UCpTb8dBmkg I'll start off by saying it's got a good atmosphere to go along with what it is. The basic premise is that you're an anti-virus program defending off viruses, and the visuals and music that accompany it fit their their roles well to put you into that world. The basic gameplay is simple. You have lanes of creeps that mindlessly run into your core. The bare bones of all TD games. However, the game isn't as simple as plopping down a tower and forgetting about it. You have to allocate a limited pool of power to to each tower, and the more you give it, the stronger it is. So you're always frantically shifting your defenses around as the waves progress. That means you aren't staring at the screen and letting the game play itself, which is always a good thing. You also have to click little cubes and diamonds for ressources to upgrade and build your stuff, so you always have to be on the lookout for those. The game even grants you a free limited-time tower to help clean up some of the creeps that make it through, which is also nice. Nobody likes banging your head against the keyboard as the final creep runs into the core with only a sliver of health, ruining your perfect run. The music is also good, if repetitive, but that's kind of what techno is all about. I also really enjoy the fact that the music changes as you add power to different towers, and that when the tower themselves fire, they also add to the beat. It's almost as if you're remixing the song yourself. But now let's talk about some of the negatives. While the game does give you a good tutorial to get you started, it doesn't do a good job explaining the newer things you get later on down the line. It's all about trail and error. You also have no idea how much of a difference you're making when you upgrade a tower or give it power. You get a visual cue that the range has increased, but not about how much extra power you're giving it. A percentage or something would be nice to have. Also, the game kept on sending in new enemies at me that I had no idea how to deal with properly. The first being a big cube that only slows down when you constantly hit it with something. But the only thing that constantly fires is the free tower that's on a long cooldown. You also have to control it manually, so you can't allocate resources or build new things until you've finished dealing with the threat. Then the game snowballs into something you can't recover from, so you have to start over. Then there's the problem of not knowing how effective a certain tower is against a certain enemy type. I got a tower that was supposed to be effective against shielded enemies, but when they came, even at full power it wasn't that great. And when you start throwing other normal minions into the mix, you're never sure what tower you should prioritze over another as they enemies bum-rush you from all directions. And not only that, it's extremely frustrating when the tower that's effective against certain types chooses to fire at another enemy, and the one it's supposed to kill struts by unscathed. There needs to be some sort of target priority. But yeah, all of that is only a problem if you're OCD like me and want a perfect score. There's plenty of lives you can leak before you get a game over and have to retry. So in summary, this is a solid TD game at $3. The game offers good content, a variety of enemy types, keeps you engaged constantly in what's going on, interesting setting and music (if you like techno), and is genreally just a good time waster. Get it now, or even wait for a sale when this game won't cost more than a dollar. You'll get some enjoyment out of it.