The Sentient

Sometimes you buy a game on sale and think that you're pretty smart in pulling off a good deal. Sometimes you check back in years later to find that you purchased this and are now well past the refund period. Buying early access games then doesn't seem so smart. This should probably be delisted?

It's interesting to play and looks like it has plenty of potential, but it segfaults and crashes very often. If not for that I would recommend it.

At the current moment, game is unplayable. Will change review if this game ever necros back to life.

I think this game ended up being Space Haven. Anyway, game is dead, hasn't been updated in like a year and is broken, buy Space Haven instead.

The game is fun and addicting... but it crashes just about every 10 minutes or if you cough, sneeze or blink...

GAME IS BROKEN AND DEAD ENOUGH SAID.

No

Too buggy to function. Never was able to really get past the tutorial, since the game would never recognize that I had made an engine room. Also seems to crash a lot, and leak memory. What a shame, the intro & premise are pretty interesting.

The Sentient is an abandoned Early Access ripoff of FTL, the space surival strategy game where you keep yourself alive by platespinning while RNG rips your stats to shreds. What fun. The game started out as a 2D top down game like FTL, then the developer decided to take the money he had scammed out of gamers and try make this a 2D ISO perspective game instead of finishing what he committed to. Ethical, isn't it? Nope. The game was abandoned less than 2 years after launch and hasn't been updated in over 5 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed. Despite not being in Steam Early Access (where this arguably belongs), the game is missing features and is apparently incomplete. Due to the lack of meaningful progress from the developer, it's unlikely the game will be completed at all, yet the developers reprehensively have their hand out for money for an incomplete game. This is a good reason for gamers to avoid this. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 14 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers. The Sentient carries the ridiculous scam price of $10 USD, more than you can buy FTL for. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend.

In it's current state I cannot recommend this game. Even though it's still in early access the controls are rough, the UI is a bit unweildly and you can't even rotate furniture. It's got a good idea behind it but it needs a lot of work to make out the rough edges.