SENTRY is in the Steam Tower Defense Fest! Unsurprisingly, we’re big fans of the genre – but SENTRY isn’t your typical Tower Defense/FPS hybrid, so I thought it might be useful for people checking us out for the first time to have a little explainer.
We wanted to do something different with Action Defense games. After all, OMD, Dungeon Defenders and Sanctum already exist and therefore our vision is a twist on the usual format :)
This originally stemmed from thinking about what defending a spaceship from an alien horde would actually be like. For us, we felt that it should be less passive and involve a desperate, attritional defense with opportunities to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This feeling has ultimately driven what SENTRY became, and how it differs from other games in the genre.
For example; while you absolutely need deployables (our name for traps and turrets) to help repel the hordes, you are the most powerful weapon and success relies on you constantly fighting. You’re a fast, responsive character and as you can output a lot of damage, should be where the action is heaviest. To match that, enemies are less zombie-like and will put up a fight.
The game takes place in a non-linear campaign. As you pick an escape route from Earth, you’ll be constantly boarded and attacked in random parts of your ship. Often, this will be in multiple places at once, so you’ll have to choose where and when to defend. For each enemy that escapes, that level will be harder to defend if it’s attacked again – so make every bullet count.
This also means that sometimes you’ll lose levels and victorious enemy forces will progress through your vessel – as long as the enemy doesn’t destroy the Ship’s Core or all of the defending crew, the campaign and your escape attempt continues. This is a different approach in the context of a linear TD game, where losing is a blocker to progression. In SENTRY however, occasional loss of levels will happen and is okay! Think of it as losing the battle but not the war :)
Depending on your performance in combat over the course of a campaign, you could succeed in a blaze of glory, limp over the finish line… or die trying. Because the game is run-based, there’s always another escaping ship that needs your help. Each run is varied by choosing different vessels with modifiers, campaigns, randomised enemy forces and the weapons/deployables etc. you’ve unlocked on previous escapes. Each piece of your equipment has an upgrade path too.
Because we’re in Early Access, you can find our Roadmap here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/5921742839579227575
We’re currently working on Major Update 2, which is the co-op update. If you’re interested in what was in Major Update 1, you can read about it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/4235154200342543684
So that’s SENTRY – if all of the above sounds to your liking, please check us out! To those TD fans finding us for the first time I hope this post has proven helpful. Hit us up on the forums or any of our socials (links are on the side bar of the store page) if you have any questions - and enjoy the TD Fest :)
