Hyper Sentinel Pays Tribute to Retro Shoot Em Ups

By:GeekyGamerGirl87

Hyper Sentinel is a shoot em up game (shmup for short) that is developed by Four5SixPixel along with publisher Huey Games, that pays a great tribute to the shmups that I grew up with as a kid. I would also like to take the time to say thank you to the developers, for providing a free copy of the game for me to play so that I could write the review. I have a huge love for shmups and ones that can give me a little nostalgia as well gets a high praise in my book.

One of the biggest things I like about Hyper Sentinel, is that there is no storyline with it. This is simply a shmup that really is going for the nostalgia of shumps of yester years. The game features an online leader board that allows you to go after other players scores, just like in the days of the arcade. Although, the game does offer  achievements as well, I really do like that they added the online leaderboard as well.

As the game is across multiple platforms, it is unsure if the leaderboards are only per platform or if it takes the scores of everyone from each platform. I imagine it would be per platform as cross play has not been done to include every single platform yet, but maybe one day in the future that can happen. A gamer can dream, right?

There are 12 different levels in the game, but I can tell you that they are not as simple as you think they would be. When it comes to difficulty; Hyper Sentinel delivers very well offering up to three different modes for difficulty. The first mode is Retro; which I thought was their version of easy mode. You will be sadly mistaken because there is nothing easy about Retro mode.  Retro mode does offer a nice challenge as well, and it is loads of fun. The next mode they offer is Normal mode which is a tad bit harder than the Retro mode. The final mode they offer is Hard mode and although I found it a little tad bit easier -which could be since I have played multiple times- it was still very fun and exciting, and it does become a little more difficult, as you see that the Boss will be a lot harder.

The game also offers three different game play modes . The modes that is offers are arcade mode, survival mode, and boss mode. In arcade mode, you are playing a standard game of Hyper Sentinel. In survival mode it implies exactly what it says. You are trying to survive as long as possible in the game. In boss mode, your main objective is trying to take down the boss for each level.  Depending on which skill level you choose this will be either easy or difficult to do. The game also has medals that you collect in the game and each level has five medals or objectives that you must complete to get five stars. All the levels carry the same two objectives which are Alien Ace and Speed Star. The three other objectives vary depending on the level.

If the thrill of maintaining the highest score on the  steam leaderboard isn’t enough for you, the game does offer achievements and has a total of 34 different achievements that can be collected. The game also offers Mixer integration. With mixer integration, your viewers can spawn enemies as well as spawn different power ups. As a mixer streamer, you just simply start up your mixer broadcast go to the website and enter your code and then your viewers can help influence your game.  I found it interesting that they chose to do a mixer integration but not a twitch integration, as I could see a lot of twitch streamers playing this and having their viewers influence the game.

The game uses both a gamepad and keyboard as a way of controls. Although it says full gamepad support, I did find that there was an issue using the up button on the directional pad. So, you do have to use analog stick. Other than that little bit of an issue, the controls for gamepad were pretty good. If you want to add an additional challenge, I do recommend playing with the keyboard. The controls were a little strange to me, as when I normally play shmups I usually prefer to use which ever feel comfortable to me. For Hyper Sentinel, I can honestly say using gamepad is going to be your best bet if you want a fun casual experience, again because keyboard just did not feel right to me for this game.

Although, I did find the game to be fun, there are a few issues with the game as well. As I stated earlier not being able to use the up button on the directional pad. It seems that it is completely dead, and you cannot use it. Another issue I came across was the scoring system. Sometimes, when I played the score would completely wipe out on a retry and other times it would just penalize you and take some of your points when you played. After playing a few more times; I made the discovery that if you are over a certain amount of points; the game will just penalize you for retrying and take a small amount of points. However, if you don’t make that certain amount of points then it wipes it all away. I wish that this would have been mentioned in the tutorial, as that would have saved a lot of confusion on why my score was setting to zero sometimes, but not other times.

Another issue that should be brought to the attention of the developers is that there is no way to escape the game. The only way you can escape the game at least on the Steam version is to use alt + f4. I thought that maybe you could exit in the options menu, but there is only an option to exit out of the options menu, and not the game itself. I even tried using the ESC key and again the game was still loaded.  As the game is coming out across multiple platforms, there is a chance that the developers did simply forget to add an exit option for the steam version.

Overall, I thought Hyper Sentinel was an okay game. It’s not bad but it does have some issues that need to be ironed out to make it a great game. If the developers can fix some of the bugs that were left in, the game would be a lot smoother and more enjoyable.  You can experience Hyper Sentinel for yourself when it launches on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One on May 11^th, 2018 and on May 8^th, 2018 on PlayStation.