Sentris Reviews

This game is great. A very straight forward playstyle, and a fun set of mechanics. Sentris is one of the better rhythmic games (sorry if i spell wrong) out there. Get it. If it still is free, that's a great price. I would like more levels!!!!

It's a cool concept, but it's terrible and clunky as a song making tool and borderline mindless as a puzzle game. You'd have an easier, more fun time downloading a sequencer yourself and actually making music if you're looking for that. Or playing one of many other musical games on Steam for actually engaging gameplay. If you do buy this, I sure hope you like listening to shitty loops over and over and over again. There's only about an hour or two worth of content and a "remix" mode that might've been cool if you didn't have to wrestle with making the game play what you want it to. Also, if you thought the whole world moving upwards after playing Rock Band/Guitar Hero for too long was bad wait until you try out making the world spin.

Sentris is a fantastic game with novel ideas on music creation. Whether you are a veteran of the music game genre (harmonix fans I am talking to you), or you simply have an interest in making music, Sentris has something fun and engaging for you to discover. The most intimidating aspect of learning to play an instrument or learning to write music is finding out how different sounds come together in collaboration to create an interesting complex whole. What makes Sentris so intriguing is the way it brings players into music creation without judgment. Players are invited to solve musical puzzles without harsh critique. This allows players to follow the game's progressive musical structure or completely deviate from the game's pre-set suggestions without negative consequence. The results can vary from being an only slightly coherent cacophony of noise to surprisingly deep melodies and rhythms that are uniquely authored by the player. Samantha Kalman may be a relatively new name to video game players, but her work on Sentris gives me hope that we will see more excellent indie games from her and her company (Timbre Interactive) in the future.

As someone who's played many music games before, this doesn't feel like one of them. It feels more like a tool to make music with predetermined beats and melodies, and while that's appealing to some, it's not quite the rhythm game I expected it to be. If you like an ambient experience, then Sentris is pretty cool. If you're looking for something akin to DDR where timing is everything, I'd skip it.

It might be worth waiting for more features before you buy it, but it's a fun, relaxing concept. A little like Cosmic DJ minus all the silliness. I'm really looking forward to seeing this develop.

Sentris is an outstanding way for a person of any level of knowledge or experience to approach making music. It translates aspects of musical theory into a set of simple visual cues that match with the audio to convey ideas without need for words, which is a truly impressive achievement. The level of guidance offered by the simple puzzle mechanics serves to push the player along while also leaving ample room for experimentation. The early portions of exploring the game are limited in such a way as to make it difficult to produce anything that sounds bad, but always with enough of your own creative decisions included to make the end result feel like the product of your own effort. As one digs deeper there is a fantastic amount of freedom and depth to be found and new concepts to be explored. My time with Sentris was fun and educational in a way that I've experienced with few other games in my life.

One of the more original games I played at Pax Prime. Love the music, composition, and how they are interwoven with game play. Took me a while to figure out the objective of the puzzle, yet, with every note, I was thoroughly enjoying the music.

I really wanted to give this game a positive review, but at the end of the day, I cannot. [i]While it is admirable to try to create a game that has interesting puzzle aspects as well as being a fully-functional music creator, it fails in finding a complexity balance between the two.[/i] Let me try to explain this. Great puzzle games are simple - [i]Tetris[/i] would be a prime example here. Great music creation programs or tools are complex (I have no good example here, but I am certain of this from messing around with [i]Audacity[/i]). [b]To me, [i]Sentris[/i] has awesome sounds and potential, but is not a fun puzzle game at all.[/b] It felt like work. Whenever I had someone try it, they got lost in the complexity as opposed to being swallowed in great puzzle-fun addiction. [b]Pros:[/b] +Very polished, and is obviously a labor of love +Ambitious project with two genres I love (mixing puzzles and music creation) [b]Cons:[/b] -Controls never felt intuitive with either controller or keyboard -Overly complex for a puzzle game -Not very addictive While I will continue a bit trying to find the magic here, I certainly do not recommend this game for the asking price.

The tutorial seems to be new based on other reviews, but it got me enough information to know what to expect. The color choices seem to be reasonable for someone with protanomaly (a type of colorblindness). While you might think that placing random notes from various instruments would produce a terrible noise, the music I've generated so far has been pleasant. The game is entertaining, but as soon as I exit a song, it leaves me with "screen spins" where I see everything on the screen as if it's twisting slowly. I can stave this off by playing forever, perhaps.

I played an early version of this game at PAX last year and could not get my head around it. I dropped blocks haphazardly in to a wheel, not understanding what I was supposed to be doing and not enjoying the sounds I was creating. I walked away feeling embarrassed that I had failed to 'get' Sentris. The tutorial in the release version immediately got me on the right track and removed my doubts about this game. Within five minutes I was creating funky loops that went beyond the tunes the game was feeding me and I felt the thrill of composition that I know the designer was aiming to inspire. There is a real satisfaction in building loops layer by layer and it is especially cool to see how the sound evolves as later layers start to push earlier ones out of the loop. The way the progression of songs helps you learn what the game has to offer in terms of depth is almost perfectly executed, the only thing that I struggled a little to figure out was how to change octaves in freestyle mode (you have to climb or descend the scale to reach the octave you want to play in). I have now worked my way through all of the 'puzzles' that the game ships with (excluding one, Kentucky Fried Chernobyl, that seems to be broken) in their default forms and started to mess with the remix function, which lets you change the BPM, key signature, scale mode and instrument set for any track, and the endless random mode. There is a lot of room to experiment using these tools and although I don't think I will be using Sentris for serious music composition I definitely see myself regularly dipping back in to this game for short jam sessions. Sentris is not without flaws; I would have gladly played through two or three times as many puzzle songs as the game shipped with or made my own with a level editor, freestyle mode being a face-button toggle rather than a shoulder-button hold makes the controls a little clumsy at times, and the game never gives you control over the length of the blocks you are placing even in the remix and infinite modes, although I suspect that this last 'flaw' was a deliberate design decision to force players to experiment and compose rather than reproducing tunes or beats they already know. I would recommend this game to anyone, even if you do not think of yourself as a musical person I think you will be pleasantly surprised by what you are able to create in Sentris.