Sentinels of Freedom

Right now, I can't recommend this game. I truly hope it gets better, and intend to keep playing it (and will go back and edit the review if they fix some of my problems with it), but at present I just don't feel that it's worth the price of entry. :( When I saw the Kickstarter for this, I squee'd a little bit, I am a huge fan of the card game, I loved Freedom Force, and in general, am fond of the superhero genre in every media form. Sentinels of Freedom has some really good elements to it, too! Character creation - aesthetics: B+ I'm spoiled. I played City of Heroes for many years (still do, in fact), the character creator on that has spoiled me to customization options that few will ever compare to, but Sentinels of Freedom has a fairly solid character creator for a tactical game. Character creation - mechanics: C There seems to be a lot of options here, but ... those options don't really mean a lot. Sure, you can fine tune a character to do certain things a little better, but over all, the options are mostly fluff. When you build your character you choose three "themes", or power sets. You can only ever use 2 of those themes at a time currently, and you really don't get any additional choices from there. You choose "power melee" as a theme.. you get the same powers as anyone else who chose "power melee" as a theme. Most of the time, you're just gonna choose 2 themes and leave the 3rd alone because you have 2 that gives you the playstyle you like. Story: A+ This game has remarkably bad writing, terrible one-liners, and truly facepalm worthy puns. It's amazing. It is exactly what you would expect and want from a Sentinels game. (Sentinels isn't exactly a parody of the superhero genre, but much more a love letter to comics, especially Silver Age) Graphics: B- They graphics are fine, I guess. Not great, but I'm fine playing older games with dated graphics. I'm just not a big fan of the aesthetics choice they made for the game. It doesn't feel like it fits for a Sentinels Comics game. Gameplay: ... ugh. Here's where this game fails me. My first, and biggest complaint is: TURNS TAKE FOREVER! I know in tactical turn based games you can sometimes have decent gaps where you're waiting to go, but even in early missions, 2-3 minutes of down time vs. 20 seconds of active time per round is common place, and there's no reason to pay attention while the NPCs are acting because you can't really DO anything in response. - This problem alone being fixed would switch this to a "yes, I would recommend this game to my friends" As others have mentioned, your unique character feels uninteresting compared to the Sentinels themselves. Tachyon, Wraith, Bunker, and Unity all feel really cool and have unique abilities and are super fun to play. You are Captain Generic #327, and because of this, you feel like you're a side kick. Speaking of... even the Sentinels don't feel very "superhero"ish when you're playing them. This is kind of an awkward element in the crossing of "superheroes" and "tactical combat". You're fighting through dozens of goons, but those goons often take multiple hits to take down. It ends up feeling like a slow grind, where even the generic goons pose a threat (because there are so many of them), to the point that the supervillians don't really even feel that special (in some ways, they feel like less of a threat than the goons, because while they have the HP of upwards of 10-15 goons, they have far fewer attacks than 10-15 goons). Heroes also have to give up one of their other power slots if they want a way to heal themselves, which might not be a problem if the scales were tilted more in favor of the heroes. It ends up feeling to me like the best option for playing is to make your hero a support hero, and just let them sit there and play second fiddle to the Sentinels and keep them going. Then.. there's tactics and strategy. They don't really matter. Get behind cover? Badguys will walk around the cover, it might mean you take one less shot because they used more action points to move, but that's about it. Badguys don't really try for cover, sure, it influences things (like someone else said, cover from YOU protects an enemy from a grenade they don't have cover from). Badguys trying to get to a mission exit, Bunker in Turret Mode at a choke point? Pfft, doesn't matter, they'll run right past him. The only "strategy" is keeping track of the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock combat mechanics, which you can really only do so much with. These faults can all, individually, be forgiven, but they stack up to make the game just not very good as a Superhero RPG, or as a Tactical RPG. Which is a pity because I wanted to love this game.

I was a backer on Kickstarter. My favorite games are XCOM (including XCOM2), Civilization (All), and Battletech. This game has the strategy and replayability of those games. It also has a few pluses - the character builder is amazing, the "reactions" add a hyper-realistic level complexity, chaos, and action that I am really enjoying, finally, the 3D art is amazing. The character builder offers so many options! I really believe this is going to add to the replayability of the game, especially with the promised battle simulator coming soon. One thing I hope we get is the ability to have multiple heroes. I know that maybe a HUGE ask, but it would be really cool. It is a turn-based strategy game that really smacks of realtime strategy. Because of the reactions, it is like no other turn-based strategy game I have played. The battlefield is always changing and forcing you to adapt your strategy. It really takes the game to the next level. Finally, artwork. The character, environments, and backgrounds have blown me away. I have played some Sentinels of the Multiverse and am familiar with some of the characters and the multiverse. This game really captures the Sentinels look and feel. The animations are good. No spoilers here - but I love that the story went the direction it did. The comic book panel cut-scenes were awesome AND they actually included my character - I love this. For me, the story was a throwback to many of the comic books of my youth. It is really well written and immersive. All in all, I give it a 5/5 and highly recommend it.

I kickstarted this game, as I'm a huge fan of Sentinels of the Multiverse. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend it right now. I don't understand why this isn't in Early Access, it's very unpolished. If it were in EA, that would be fine, but... it's not, and it's not. Fights take forever and are a grind fest. The UI is functional but only barely. Making your character's outfit is kind of a chore due to how many clicks and mouse moves it takes to try out a different piece (click to open huge menu, click on item, menu closes, go back to first button...). I will say that the customization options are pretty good. Not the best I've seen, certainly, but pretty good. The graphic style is... Well, you can see for yourself. I think they were going for sort of a pseudo-cel-shaded look to emulate comics, but it really just looks unfinished. One thing I do really like is the defense system (though this too is not without its caveats). Every attack does a certain type of damage. I can't remember the names, because they use all kinds of comic-booky names like "ping" instead of piercing and... something like "woomph" instead of explosive. But each enemy can have multiple different types of defenses, and they always use the best defense against any given attack. There are also effects which can remove particular defenses. I like this a lot better than a more common system where you'd just have some number of numeric defenses (e.g. physical vs. magical defense, or elemental resistances, etc). First, it's just very flavorful. Second, it adds some depth to the stance system, as each of your stances can have different defenses. For example, my main character's stances offer Evade and Block in one; and Soak and Deflect in another. And that should be really intuitive, too, except... Those damage type names! Like... Block. Great. That sounds like it's probably good against directed attacks or some kind, but maybe less effective against explosions. But that's not what damage is called. Damage types are stuff like "Ping", "Zaakt", "Foom", and "Thokk". I can appreciate the effort to make it feel more flavorful--certainly the high dedication to flavor is one of the things I love about Sentinels of the Multiverse, but in this case it actively makes the game harder to play. Overall, I think this is a solid start. And if they keep working on it, fixing things that are broken, adding polish, re-working systems and rebalancing, this game has a lot of potential. But in its current state, it's slow, frustrating, and boring.

I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this game. I would like to say that I can review the game as a fan of turn based strategy games, and as a longtime fan of the Sentinels genre. I feel like potential players should see the grievances first before seeing all the thumbs up, “it’s a good game” with no explanation. The next paragraph is my elevator pitch quick paragraph, everything afterwards goes into more detail. In short, you can tell that this was a kickstarter game made by people who enjoy strategy games and the Sentinels universe, I feel like game development wasn’t fully optimized for an enjoyable experience since the mechanics seem to go in many different directions which can confuse the player’s experience instead of augment it. It made me appreciate the other Sentinels products that much more such as Sentinels of the Multiverse and Sentinels Comics. I would recommend you pick up this game after a couple of more patches or if the game goes on sale. With that out of the way, please see below on my review of Sentinels of Freedom. --As a turn-based strategy game, mechanics, and design-- I have always liked turn-base strategy games. Typically, these games will have you go up against an opponent and will give you different options in order to deal with threats. If your opponent is focusing on a lot of melee units, pick up some ranged units to pick them off before they get to you. If you must reach a certain location, pick a high armor unit to help get you to the fight. I begin with this idea because although Sentinels of Freedom classifies itself as a turn-based strategy game, it does not feel like a good one that. The mechanics the game relies on seem overly complicated and in my experience, were not explained well at all. One mechanic I found extremely slow and inconsistent was the initiative turn order. Initiative probably has some sort of "math" behind it, but I found that certain levels my one character would be the first to act and then on a subsequent turn be the last to act. Taking damage from enemy sources twice before I had a chance to react to anything. It led to a handful of my encounters of shoot bad guy, go behind cover, hope they do not have enough movement to shoot me in return. Again, I’m sure there is a system in place to determine initiative, but the game doesn’t do a good job at slowing down and showing the player this. There are certain buttons if you hover over say Initiative 10, but it does not explain what that means. There are so many numbers and values that seem to be associated with the game, but it does not give the player an opportunity to learn about them and understand what they mean. A similar mechanic that has issues like this is the aggro system. It seems that bad guys come at waves and will try to attack a person with the highest "aggro". I played a tank where I could get aggro twice in a row but even then, so it seemed inconsistent where my other heroes would get attacked instead with no explanation why. As a side note, Line of sight is extremely strange. Somehow a ranged character cannot see a giant tank because one of their allies is standing in the way. Line of sight using a straight line from center of model to center of model. This is an easy fix so I won’t go further into that. Finally, and this is my biggest gripe with the mechanics, is that the combat relies on a comic book style "Thwack, Whomp, Ping" mechanic that feels more complicated than the game needed it to be. I found that my abilities would be good against certain opponents where I could capitalize on the mechanic and drop two bad guys a round with one hero. Though in comparison if I focused on AOE attacks, with the same character where I did not strategize using the mechanics, I would remove more bad guys using the less optimized attack type. The game focuses on an Action economy using AP (action points) where for the same APs, two real good hits a turn does not compare to consistently using an AOE attack or ability that did not capitalize on the mechanic. Even the way the game introduces the player to this mechanic, it focuses on a tell and not show idea meaning you’ll need to read prompts through a UI that crowds your screen when you as a player just want to get to the action. The fixes with this should be a scrub of the tutorial section in favor of a more in-depth version that shows the players how to play the game instead of telling them how to play. Have the hero you create be in an alleyway fighting some thugs and see how different types of abilities are more effective than others. Slow down the game and have certain areas highlighted so players know what they need to look to optimize their decision. Have these mechanics in place more meaningful, such as if you use the correct Ping vs Soak ability you gain a bonus 1 – 2 AP which maximizes your turn since you paid attention to the strategy of it. Strategy games reward players making meaningful choices, not optimized. --As a Sentinels product-- It was extremely neat to see some of my favorite heroes realized in a video game environment. I was always excited with Absolute Zero’s hp draining abilities to fuel his even stronger powers. I was also extremely excited when I saw my favorite hero Expatriette on the screen as a playable character. I always remembered how awesome female Punisher was, shooting up the enemy with different bullets and weapons for certain circumstances… But playing Expatriette and Absolute Zero did not live up to my imagination. In my play through, I found that Expatriette was not useful because of action economy... I'll explain in a bit. Compared to Bunker, who uses the power of guns too, was substantially better as a character since most of his attacks were AOE shots and he had a better time surviving a lot of damage. So instead of going through the game, playing the characters I love, I had to play the characters that were optimal for the many situations in the game. Kill all the bad guys as fast as possible, get to the green arrow to progress the story. So what I’m trying to get across is that it felt like the choice of superhero was meaningless. Pick your AOE heroes and tanks to heal and brush off damage. Or better yet, pick the fastest character to run to the exit to finish the level if applicable; you level up regardless. Furthermore, the chapter 1 campaign did not feel all that much like a sentinel’s comic story. Most missions were a “Go here, hit these bad guys, go to next location.” The first few levels were amazing like when you had to rescue the civilians and you as a player had to decide which heroes would focus on saving the civilians (environment) and dealing with the bad guys (villain). Levels like this had the feel of sentinels but they seemed to be the exception to the game and not the rule. I found that by the end of my playthrough of the game, I just tried rushing through each area to progress the story. I guess the underlying criticism is that the game looks like a Sentinels product, but at times does not feel like a Sentinels product. I feel like this game could have been independent of the Sentinels Universe and could have stood on its own, but the fact that it is “Sentinels” means you have to compare it to the other Sentinels products. On a side note, I think the voice acting was a bad decision from a game development point of view. Having comics speak through speech bubbles would lead you as the reader to create the character’s voice and personality. The voices for some of these characters were recycled between multiple characters and NPCs which definitely hurt the immersion for the game. I ended up turning the volume off for voices which ended improving the experience. Take my review with a grain of salt. I will still play the game to see if it improves. This game just makes me want to play the card game or RPG just that much more...

Well balanced and interesting combat. Lots of character customization (both in your own hero and customizing the allied heroes). It doesn't have Freedom Force's focus on environments and destructible terrain, but it has basically everything else that made that a great game.

On this thumbs down can't recommend review, I want to open up by saying "This game is awesome. I highly recommend it". While this seems to be a stupid joke, it's not. It's a directly contrary statement that I whole-heartedly mean which about sums up my experience with this game. This is a superhero game that lets you take out literally a hundred thugs at a time without breaking a sweat, yet manages to make you feel like you're a man of cardboard. There's a deep set of rules that can lead to interesting tactical decisions and yet, most stages feel dreadfully shallow. It has all the potential charm of the sentinels universe while ultimately falling flat in the end. Mechanically, this game is one-of-a-kind. I expected X-Com meets freedom force with a touch of Final Fantasy Tactics. It's none of these things. It's a story-based strategy game where you build teams out of fairly static heroes. No cover systems, a unique implementation of overwatch skills, an interesting "Stance" system, a focus on damage types and next to no character development... only raw tactics. At it's core, I absolutely love this game. The opening bank robbery stage? Entering the simulator and building a team of heroes against a team of villains? Building your hero and learning to use your heroes together to enhance their skills and control the battlefield. It's genuinely fantastic. But at the end of every play session I come out disappointment, bored or frustrated. All of the potential for an amazing game is here, but the level design and overall flow of the game manages to sabotage all my goodwill. The single biggest flaw is that nearly every mission consists of fighting massive waves of thugs. Midway through the game, your party of 4 is fighting against 100 enemies and holding their own. The heroes Health pool is large and the thugs deal a few points of damage at a time. It's a game of attrition that you need unique tactics to win. But this also means that you'll be playing a turn, and then watching the enemies move for 10 minutes straight. You're health dropping by 1 to 2 points, over and over and over as your hero is slowly pushed towards death and you can't do a thing. And then a bad initiative roll and you get to watch all 75 enemies take another turn. What should be a 20 minute fight takes an hour. But its not just the pacing, the swarm focus means that certain abilities become favored. AOE attacks, and damage fields become exponentially more powerful than single target power blows, healing becomes integral because once you control the numbers you can outheal any damage they can deal. The only tactical consideration single hit character get is that sometimes you need a character's damage type. I previously mentioned initiative and it too becomes a frustration. I've had missions where I needed to defeat certain targets but due to a bad initiative roll, they spawn in after my actions and run to the exit before I get an action. This isn't an issue with the mechanics of initiative directly, but an issue with the balance and level design that allows it to be a game breaker. One final major, unforgivable flaw is that the path-finding and AI is past broken. In fact, I suspect it's why they chose a mob swarm design. The AI on its own tends to act with little logic or self-preservation. I'll summon a robotic ally to see it walk past a line of enemies ready to murder me as it chases an enemy on the other side of the field. In another mission I realized why damage fields were so effective as my path-finding tried to run through a damage field to the left, back through to the right... all to attack an enemy one step ahead of me. Suffice it to say, I micromanaged the damage field missions. Here's the thing though, despite all my frustrations I've genuinely enjoyed this game as a whole. I love what they have here. As a Sentinels of the Multiverse fan it's amazing to see each and every character so uniquely interesting in design. Every character in the party including my own felt overpowered when utilized to their potential. Whether it's Bunker turning into a turret to hold off a wave of enemies or Tachyon dashing behind enemy lines to rescue a person and returning to start in one move... they are each unique and amazing. This same care goes into the villains. One villain can overwatch to stop your movements, while another can create clones of himself if you don't finish off the original. One or two of these guys can turn an average mission into something unique and exciting. The game features a number of interesting mission objectives too. One stage has you arranging traffic blockades between waves of looters to prevent anyone from escaping. A few more feature several short scenes where you fight a couple dozen enemies at a time and advance the plot in between. A few more, though I think they should be broken up, involve full length missions back to back for the epic scenes. The varied flows works well for the comic book format. when they do launch the planned Chapter 2 or future issues of the game it's well-prepared for telling interesting tales. But, since you can play each story mission a single time you don't get to enjoy the high points of the game at will. I've put 11 hour into the game and I've made it as far as the last boss who happened to glitch and force a reload for the first time in 11 hours. But the only way to get the chance is to redo 3 back-to-back linked missions and I just have my doubts I'm going to go through the efforts. - - - According to the forums, they are planning to add in a Chapter 2 to this game and development still continues though its not marked early access. This gives me hope because every real complaint I had could be fixed through design the next set of levels. More of the good, less of the swarm. So, it comes to this review... would I recommend this game? I don't actually know. As is, probably not especially at its current price, but it's entirely possible future chapter 2 additions will change my mind. This is as far from a bad game as I've seen but its still not ready for my thumbs up.

I can't recommend this game in its current state. Its not that anything is [i]bad[/i] per say, just that the enemy composition tends towards "fight fifty guys" and you spend most of your time just waiting to take your turn so you can punch four of them to death instantly and then wait for the remaining 46 to take their turns which will largely consist of "moving closer to you" and then taking a potshot (and probably missing) or dealing 6-12 damage (of your 200 hp). The dialog/story/what have you also makes very little sense. Like showing up to a store called "Guns and Stuff" and asked to stop the thieves from stealing the guns. One of your dialog options is to ask about the "and stuff." Oh and then Tachyon remarks that this is a poorly thought out robbery because there's like twenty dudes coming out of the building and fifteen more coming in from the street as backup. Just hang a lampshade on that proud nail. It'll be fine. No one will notice the fact that nearly every mission is "three to five super heroes" vs. "fifty normal people." I won't even stoop to saying "fifty normal people with guns" because sometimes they don't even have guns (despite just having robbed a megamart store called [b]Guns[/b] and Stuff)...

I'm a big fan of Sentinels of the Multiverse and played both Freedom Force games until I ran out of mods. This game reminds me of neither. Sentinels of Freedom is a rather bland turn based skirmish game, with no sense of playing with super heroes . Bunker, the walking super-suit tank can't lift anything or break anything. The Batman expy Wraith has to walk 30 feet through a door to get to the other side of a bank counter. The super-speedster Tachyon runs up to people and punches them in the back -- no, wait, she does some buffing and an area attack without a special effect as well. So far no flying, no wall-climbing, almost no interaction with the environment and not much fun. I don't normally mind games with a rock-paper-scissors approach to attack resistance, but it's weirdly implemented here. Thugs with different weapons have wildly different resistances for no apparent reason, making common sense useless. The only way to find out how you should attack any enemy is though the tooltips. I get the feeling they started by deciding on using rock-paper-scissors and then later realized that they had made a game where almost all the enemies are goon henchmen. What to do? I know, let's make the guy with a pistol immune to punching and the guy with a baseball bat immune to guns. Problem solved! A fiddly UI and uninspired graphic design does nothing to raise the impression. The character maker is a bit of fun, with plenty of costumes and looks (although not much power design). But all in all, there is sadly not much to recommend this game.

I'm a fan of comics, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and squad-based tactics games, so I really wanted to love Sentinels of Freedom. At first, just being able to make my own superhero and take on villains in the Sentinels Comics world was fun, and I was excited to later unlock heroes like Expatriette, Absolute Zero, and Legacy. Unfortunately, although I finished the launch campaign (Chapter 1), I've lost interest in completing the more recently released Chapter 2 and can't recommend the game to others. The biggest flaw with this game (which some other reviews have pointed out) became apparent even in the tutorial mission: rather than pit you against a variety of villains and creatures drawn from the vast array of decks in Sentinels of the Multiverse, the bulk of each multi-stage, hour(s)-long mission features a seemingly-endless stream of thugs and robotic drones threatening to overwhelm your small band of heroes, punctuated by the same 3 recurring villains (unless you include Fright Train and Ermine, who only appear briefly). Nearly every mission consists of trying to achieve some objective while picking away at wave after wave of same-y thugs. More frustrating is the fact that you must prioritize reducing the enemies' chance to hit and setting up damage-over-time effects rather than going straight at the enemies with power blasts and punches (the latter of which seems fun until that hero you sent in to 'whoop up on the bad-guys', even Legacy, gets picked apart by five or six enemy thugs). And that's on the standard difficulty setting. I finished the epic slog of the last few missions in Chapter 1 in hopes that Chapter 2 would address some of these issues (more enemy variety, less 'survive 4-5 waves of enemies' missions), but (although some monster enemies did spice up one mission) things swiftly went even further into 'endless swarms of thugs and drones' territory. After one epic battle against what must have ended up being 40-50 enemies resulted in nothing more than a checkpoint and instructions to fight through another wave (with half my team dead and the rest on their way there), I decided enough was enough. TL;DR- Should be fun, wanted it to be fun, wasn't fun.

[h1]Summary[/h1] One-line review: Sentinels feels like an early access game without the bugs. Sentinels aces the feel of the card game, but the rest of it feels incomplete and poorly implemented. The story is [i]meh[/i] and only comes with “Chapter 1.” Powers are very poorly balanced, so most heroes only really use 1 or 2 abilities. The attack/defense mechanic could add depth…if more effort was put into power design. Plus, cornerstone mechanics for most turn-based games (cover) feel poorly executed. [hr][/hr] Based on the popular card game [i]Sentinels of the Multiverse[/i], Sentinels of Freedom should have been a slam dunk. A broad range of heroes and villains, lots of background material, the ability to play as some of your favorite characters, and your own superhero that fits perfectly in the Sentinels multiverse. Finally, gameplay is smooth, mostly bug-free, and looks like how the card game plays out in my head. While Sentinels absolutely aces it for immersion into, and reverence for, the source material, it falls short in every other regard. It feels like a lot of these problems are the result of good ideas, but a lack of implementation. Story-wise, Sentinels gets a C-. Enough to pass, but still disappointing. While good comic books can be complex, deep, and tackle important issues; bad comic books are the stereotype. Sentinels is a bad comic book, with all of the painfully oversimplified dialog/plot that would embarrass a writer for Saturday Morning Cartoons. While this game is only “Chapter 1,” the website [b][i]still[/i][/b] says Chapter 2 will be released April 2020…and the port to PS4 is still incomplete…I’m not hopeful. In my opinion, saying Sentinels is like XCOM is a disservice to XCOM, and I’m not [i]just[/i] saying that for the sake of sarcastic humor. The only mechanical thing these games have in common is that you take turns performing actions for your individual soldiers/heroes. XCOM made a lot of broad design choices that made it an interesting, challenging, and revolutionary game for the turn-based strategy genre. Sentinels, when faced with the same choices, makes inferior decisions in almost every case. Balance in the powers is terrible. Most fights are against hordes of minions, which makes area-of-effect attacks extremely powerful. Bunker, a character with very powerful AOE, might as well be renamed Galactus, Devourer of Worlds. And Absolute Zero…he gets a strong AOE that is, more-or-less, free that he can use 2 to 3 times each round. Meanwhile, Wraith, an arguably OP character in the card game, is almost useless since she has no real AOE. I created a minion summoning hero, and at first my drones were pathetic. After about 2 missions I got the game’s one “level up,” and suddenly my drones have 3x more HP, 2x more damage, 2x more attacks, and push the length of a car. Without this upgrade, the minion power set would have been unplayable, and it was the only minion power I used regularly. Again…balance. Sentinels has an “attack type vs. defense type” mechanic…which is interesting in theory, but again, incomplete. A few abilities say “removes Evade” or “adds Block.” Ok, we might be getting somewhere…there’s potential for interesting tactical choices about adding/removing defense. Except I only recall seeing Evade for removal, and most things die easily enough if you have good AOE. This makes manipulating defenses an actual waste of time. When a game includes cover, it should have a significant effect on tactics. While Sentinels pays lip service to “cover”…even after finishing the game I’m still not sure how (or even if) cover had any affect. Again, feels like they wanted to add the tactical depth, but dropped it (or scaled WAY back) as it became difficult to implement. Overall, I did have fun, but only because I am a big superhero fan (and we have very few superhero games) and a big Sentinels of the Multiverse fan. I will not be playing Chapter 2 whenever/if it comes out.