Sentinel (iPhone)
iPhone integration (About)
- Save state: Yes
- iPod music: Yes
- Status bar: No
- Version: 1.1
- Price as reviewed: £2.99
- by Origin8
Upon discovering a lucrative mining opportunity on Martian soil, nobody quite predicted that aliens would invade it - luckily, you come as the savior in the dropship named Sentinel. You drop towers to eliminate the enemy before it breaks into your base and wipes out the human foray into interstellar quarries.
In most Tower Defense games, enemies run over a set path, with only the towers you build to defend your base. Sentinel introduces fortified blockades (or barriers as they are known in game), along with robotic drones that can repair them. Up to a maximum of three are allowed on the screen, and they can also mine for resources (and therefore cash) if they're not preoccupied with their repairing duties. Of course, the enemy will inevitably overpower the barriers, but having them there adds a new twist to the genre.
There are a handful of different towers, each with their own strengths and weaknesses - all of them without exception animate beautifully and look deadly. We especially loved the beam tower that fires a pulse of light, and this is one of the more powerful structures in the game. Of course, against a mass of light weight, quick enemies it's a little useless, and so there's a bomb tower which does a fair bit of area damage, but it's ineffective against flying units.
Each of the creeps are also well animated, from the general running around to the tearing down of your blockades - and even though the game offers a surprising amount of visual sci-fi flair, there's no let up in it's framerate. It's impressive, given that most of the time we were running our iPod music on top - there's no music in game due to apparent performance issues.
Each map has two modes, Assault and Endurance - the former being the fixed wave mode which you must complete to unlock the latter, infinite wave mode. In addition, there's four difficulty levels and online high scores - but we felt that the three maps the game had was insufficient, even when taking into account the multiple difficulty levels.
Simply put, this game is a lot of fun. We enjoyed it immensely, from the sweet animated menu system to the intuitive touch controls (you can even pinch to zoom), and even though Sentinel is short on content, it's unique features add depth to the Tower Defence genre. It's definitely one of the most well presented games in it's class, and it's certainly set a benchmark for new innovation in an already overcrowded genre.
Grade: B, Great
Three maps may just be a little stingy for a game that brings some brand new features to a genre filled with repetition. Nevertheless, we think it's one worth having.
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