Hyper Sentinel Demo

Retro shmups seem to be popular again around the gaming community, especially if they are polished and feature engaging gameplay mechanics. They might look fairly simple, but shoot ‘em ups are anything but easy to design. Besides the fact that the controls have to be spot on in order to eliminate unnecessary frustration, it’s also important to reward the players with various power-ups or items to make progress more enjoyable.

Hyper Sentinel is a fast-paced shoot ‘em up that challenges you to fly an agile spaceship and use it to destroy much larger battleships. The whole game is designed to look and feel as retro as possible, even if the textures come in high-resolution versions fit for modern screens. Moreover, you can use a gamepad as well, which makes it a lot easier to control the spaceship.

The action takes place around various spaceships you have to destroy, and they are all considerably bigger than your own craft. You can defeat them by blowing up turrets and various other ship components, not to mention all the supporting fighters that pop up once you start shooting. Obviously, there are also bosses that must be defeated every now and again.

No shmup is complete without power-ups and combos, and Hyper Sentinel features both. You can inflict a lot of damage on enemy ships if you happen to pick up a power-up at the right time, not to mention the fact that multiple successful shots can trigger nice combos. In short, there’s no shortage of awesome explosions throughout the adventure.

Lastly, the graphics are quite decent in the demo, but don’t expect anything out of the ordinary either. It’s a bit of a bummer that most of the backgrounds are black, even if the battleships occupy a large part of the screen most of the time. Hence, while the artwork is not necessarily bad, it lacks that certain spark to make it memorable even after you are done with the game.

In the end, Hyper Sentinel is certainly very polished in terms of gameplay mechanics and the action sequences, but it needs more work when it comes to story and graphics. Hence, you can support the developers by participating in the game’s Kickstarter campaign.