Making their commercial gaming debut, JLau Games’ Solitary Sentinel is a rough-around-the-edges take on Space Invaders. Reminding me heavily of the superb Utopia Must Fall, you control a sentinel at the bottom of the screen, which must survive waves of enemies from destroying it. The game aims to replicate an 80’s arcade feel, but it’s a mixed bag.
Firstly, let’s get the graphics and user interface out of the way. The monochrome style is a stark, basic design choice. It isn’t pretty, but to be fair, it works when in-game. Whilst enemies have a yellow charge to them before they fire an attack, what is missing graphically is seeing their attacks actually hit you. Whilst the monochrome gameplay is a choice, the user interface of the menus and upgrade screens is blocky, ugly, and sometimes glitchy. They flash in and out sometimes when you hover over them. It doesn’t give a strong first impression of quality.
Once in the game, Solitary Sentinel feels slow and floaty. The movement of your sentinel is slow as it’s part of the upgrade system, but also the fire rate is slow and cumbersome by design. These are upgrades you can repeatedly improve upon across your main and secondary weapons, but things will rarely feel fast or furious. Solitary Sentinel has a unique trade-off when it comes to weapon upgrades, and it’s key to the way you play. As you aim to fire weapons, you’ll have three red lines which visually mark the dead centre and potential range for your attacks. As you upgrade weapons, they’ll often come with an increased range stat and this means weapons will no longer fire along the central red line trajectory. Instead, they’ll have a chance to veer to either side of the central red line, and get progressively wider and wider as you upgrade further. The problem with this is that enemies don’t usually get wider to match the trade-off, and because the game is slow and floaty, it feels frustrating rather than challenging. It is one of the game’s biggest differentiators, and I’m very on the fence about its implementation. It feels too powerful, as each wave also runs to a time limit that invokes a solar flare to drain your health if you take too long. Often, it’s because you are missing shots that this occurs.
The other reason that the solar flare may often occur is due to the floaty nature and overzealous reactions of explosions and area of effect damage. If you use a bomb or a powerful weapon, the enemies are pushed back like soapy warriors at a swimming pool. All too often, enemies would be blasted off the screen, and as they take a while to reappear, you’ll have lost plenty of time.
What I liked about Solitary Sentinel is the upgrade system and the weapons themselves. There are lots to choose from, and you’ll get four to pick from at semi-random after each wave. I say semi-random as certain tiered upgrades are unlocked after a set number of waves, and these can be brought forward using meta progression upgrades. You’ll never truly be able to feel comfortable, as the upgrade system doesn’t allow you to. However, mixing up bombs with poison gas or lightning arcs means that you can play with ranged, homing, elemental, or melee style attacks. There is a good mix and aside from the issues of area of effect explosions, they feel quite well balanced. In the version of the game I played, the game did like to crash a lot when I used drone or elemental upgrades, though, so I hope that gets patched.
There is a rough outline of a good game here, but it is going to take some work to reach it. There is a distinct lack of feedback that ranges from why I earned certain XP to when an enemy attacks you. I found the sluggish controls and floaty nature of the game didn’t quite gel in a satisfying way, which made the range stat more annoying than challenging. A minor tweak to responsiveness and a reduction of enemy pushback would go a long way to making this game feel more engaging to play. I’ve also been spoiled by Utopia Must Fall, which is just as hard, but carries its retro style and frantic speed as badges of honour. A first game is often a learning experience, so maybe with a few tweaks, this will be more of a recommendation. As of now, it’s a “for diehard fans of the genre” only.
Review copy provided by the developer. Solitary Sentinel is out now.
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