I would have thought the game would be called “Sentinel: Mars Defense”, rather than “Sentinel: Mars Defence”, but iTunes is showing the latter. Doing some auto-translation thing, maybe? I don’t mind either way, being quite happy with UK and US English and happy to write this blog in either, or both.

Anyway, that’s not important. Sentinel is a fixed-path tower defense game… or a tower defence game.

Aargh!

I think I’ll stick with the “s” spelling for now, for the genre name, even though it’ll probably cause spluttering from fellow Brits who now think I’m some sort of traitor. In my defence… oh, forget it.

Sentinel is a TD game. I bought it ages ago, but didn’t play it until last night.

First impressions were that it was a solid, uninspiring TD game without anything to recommend it over other games of its type.


Further play cemented those impressions. I mean, it works. It looks quite nice. It’s got a couple of its own ideas – barriers with health, rather than a certain number of lives, and repair droids that can repair those barriers or go off mining resources for you – but that’s about it.

It’s certainly quite addictive, simply because tower defense is an addictive genre and Sentinel doesn’t muck it up. It’s just that the tower selection is utterly bog standard, the upgrades for towers are deeply uninspiring and the enemies are equally standard, for the most part.

If you want a fixed-path TD game, by all means go and spend 59p on this. You’ll get your money’s worth, no question. I might even play it again. I might even find myself playing it a lot. I don’t know yet. It’s a decent game. It’s just that after a couple of hours of play I find it perfectly functional but completely uninspiring.