Tower Defence with roguelike elements? Sign me up. Sentry System is a new twist on the TD genre where the innovation and intrigue take place between the battles more than what happens during the battles themselves. This is an interesting twist on the genre, with a lot of replayability.
The overworld of Sentry System is a node grid where you pick your next tower or type of upgrade for the towers you’ve unlocked. Different towers do different things out of the box such as ranged attacks, area of effect damage, burn damage or shield and armour damage but most of them come with upgrade slots. As you progress through the overworld node structure, you’ll get randomised upgrades of certain types to choose from. This means you can increase firepower or attack range, maybe add multi-shot or change the type of attack from burn to electrical damage to suit your playstyle. You can also choose to unlock global upgrades too with a few limited slots and mods which can stack the odds in your favour. The last twist off the battlefield is chips which let you trade your overall shield and health of the system you are protecting for powerful upgrades. It’s a risk vs reward as it means you’ll have less room for error and if you lose once, your whole run is over.
All of this plays out with a variety of stats you can investigate but the key is to find balance. Standard shots are faster, cheaper and readily available but always less powerful than burn, electrical or gravity damage – all of which work better on enemy shields or armour. The colour-coded towers match the colours of the enemies so you can spot a lop-sided army easily and attempt to adjust it. I really applaud how Sentry System is set up to allow you to play differently each time because whilst you’ll always need some balance – there are still over 15 tower types to tweak and try out to help you find that balance. This means you can have multiple variants of the same tower – like a burning laser, an electrical laser, or a laser that fires two lasers at 70% damage each but now costs 1.5 times more to buy. It’s good fun for a tweaker and medler.
The tower defence battles themselves are fun too – most of the time. It is a TD game where you place the towers on the path to make it the longest possible to wear enemies down so range and path length are key. Later levels use multiple paths or switches where you can turn one path longer and another shorter as you move walls around and Sentry System plays like a maze puzzle at times as a result. This also includes level-specific weapons that can be charged by similar elemental towers such as freezing bombs or electrical bursts. If you can wrap paths around them and place the right tower next to the objects to charge them, they can be quite useful.
Another unique element is the boss battles. They all include something unique that you’ll have not seen before and each is a mini puzzle to solve. Whilst satisfying, they often don’t come with any context and whenever I died in Sentry System and my run was over, it was always because I hadn’t understood how to kill a boss properly. That’s partly my fault for not picking up on cues but the game could have provided some foresight and support at times. Aside from that, I did run into a couple of technical issues where things didn’t spawn properly meaning I had to restart the game and try again. This happened several times and the game takes a good 30 seconds at best to boot up which I found odd too. These are minor niggles but since I had to keep rebooting due to games getting stuck, it made them more annoying.
Those niggles aside, I found the premise of Sentry System engrossing and I enjoyed how each run felt different over the many hours of gameplay. It is a little slow at times, and a little glitchy but the idea here is solid and with a few patches this could be a fine game.
Review copy provided by the developer. Out now on Steam.
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