Sentry Knight Tactics

Sentry Knight Tactics is an Adobe Flash/AIR based mobile app like lightweight RTS with lightweight RPG elements and an art style unabashedly stolen from Brian Lee O'Malley's famous Scott Pilgrim comics (the intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's art design is galling here). The game itself is pretty badly written with annoying chunks of VR based text interspersed with pointless grinding and weak small unit size RTS-esque gameplay.

It's really important to bear in mind that while the game "works" and can be played, it's up against actual real RTS games like Command and Conquer and the Total War series, and also up against RPG's like Baldurs Gate 3 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Welcome to Steam, it's the big leagues. So how does this game compare to the giants it's facing off against? Well, badly!

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Comically, the game was written in Adobe Flash/AIR (I'm not making this up). Talk about not using the right tools for the job. Might as well try to bake a cake with a screwdriver. The extremely poor choice of game engine here is a major contributing factor to the defects with the game.

This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).

Regardless, for all intents and purposes Sentry Knight Tactics might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game?

Sentry Knight Tactics has the insane price of around $5 USD, (FIVE BUCKS FOR A FLASH GAME!!!!) it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Battlefield V", the "Tomb Raider" remake or "Rainbow 6 Siege". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Pretty fun and simple game. The art style and the sound effects/music give a very relaxed feeling. Story is also straightforward. I like the micromanagement gameplay in this game of controlling multiple units and all their attacks. It gives a nice challenge. I will say though- it gets grindy. Not even so much because of the micromanagment, but because of the quests that require you to kill x amount of enemies just to get further in the story.

While I dislike the grinding side of this game, in aspects of graphics, sound, story and combat it is a very fun game to play when you're bored!

I thoroughly enjoy this game. I've only ever seen two other game like it, called battle heart legacy and it's sequel battle heart legacy. Both of those are android exclusives i believe (1 time payment, not the in purchase crap). It takes a lot of micromanaging to play this game well, but when you can accomplish it you feel so rewarded.

I had this game in my hidden section for a long time, tried it again, and it was awful. I was continuing from a level six save file in the snow area. Controls are super clunky, your party is mostly unresponsive, and I have no idea how I got far enough for enemy encounters to consistently slaughter me

The game can be fun but they made some incredibly frustrating game choices. When going through the world overview they spam enemies along your path that are incredibly annoying to get past if you dont want to fight them and if they catch up your only options are too do the entire fight or "retreat" which sends you to the nearest graveyard which is usually at the start of the area forcing you to have to try again to walk past all the enemies, this setup makes it tedious to backtrack which you'll be doing a lot of. The controls are also terrible you can remap them which is nice but it doesn't entirely help.if you have the healer selected you cannot also tell your team to attack a target you would first have to switch to another character to do that. The final boss is easily the worst part of the game its an incredibly tedious 2 part boss fight with the first part having 2-3 bosses you have to fight again each time you lose. The main 2 bosses have huge amounts of health, spam abilities, and once your down to the final boss of the first part he starts spamming normal enemies at you and they aren't weak ones mind you one of the enemies he can spawn stuns an ally so imagine it stuns your healer, your tank now dies and you lose the fight instantly having to redo the entire thing. The 2nd part of the boss fight is you just fighting the main boss you just killed again as a harder version that again just spams abilities, enemies, and attacks that deal even more damage.

Gran juego con gran arte.
Los desarrolladores son tipos geniales que son bastante activos con las respuestas y también con una jugabilidad excelente.

The game is okay. Nothing special but I'd be proud of it if I'd made it? I'm giving this a thumbs down because much of the difficulty of this game stems from the controls not being very good. Honestly the difference between a thumbs up and a thumbs down here is like.. the ability to select a squad by drawing a square with my cursor. Not actually, but it's that and a few other choice things such as not being able to re-arrange the party members.

This game being charming as it is and its an entire series.... So far i have found this 1 to be the only game that is not balanced good enough! You cannot do the game on normal nor hard no matter what you do, it is a continuous grind of utter disappointment. I hope the other games arrive to steam but i surely hope the next 1 you create is not as bad as this 1 turned out to be! I will continue the game on Easy for there is a Boss you cannot pass due to the destructive awkwardness on Normal + Hard.

Hey Fam so this game is fun to play i love but its hard to control but its still good to play

Pretty much the closest to being the simultaneously best and worst game I've ever played in my life.
It was so tempting to write this exact same review but with a negative.

PROS:
Highly engaging warcraft 3-esq micro-heavy gameplay, if you relax for 2 seconds you die.
I like the art style, fits the game well.
Gameplay loop is good.

CONS:
The amount of grinding might be ok in a normal rpg, but ur literally fighting for ur f***ing ever single fight.
2x exp and gold probably would have made the game perfect.
You get a bunch of party members but once you start spending permanent upgrade potions ur basically locked into the same party for the whole game it is prettyyy lame.
Sometimes you get crazy spawns and just instantly die.
LAST BOSS IS UTTER BULLSHIT WHY DOES MY DOG DISAPPEAR ON THE LAST FORM THAT IS LIKE THE ENTIRETY OF THE SKILL TREE I ALREADY GAVE THE GUN DUDE LIKE EVERY ATTACK POTION IN THE GAME

In conclusion,
the premise of this game is exactly what I want and I don't know of any other games that exist like this (if you know please tell me). I would buy a sequel or a remaster in a heartbeat if they just tuned it up ever so slightly.

Mediocre game, if your units would auto-target as any normal game does i would positive review but welp you have to manually do everything and cant even queue spells

QOL is not a thing at all tho the game is decent enough to keep you entertained for a while

Finally its been abandoned so... yeah... not much to talk about

Simple yet difficult gameplay with an entertaining story and delightful character designs. Sentry Knight Tactics is both fun and challenging.

Overall, a pretty fun game that's definitely worth the money, but with a few notable flaws that can get in the way of enjoyment - such as ONE UNOBTAINABLE ACHIEVEMENT

Pros:
-Vibrant and cute artstyle, backgrounds are especially impressive, abilities are dynamic
-Good amount of content for the pricetag (see hours played) although some of that will likely be grinding for gold, quest items, or equipment
-Responsive controls
-From my own experience, and what I've seen in discussions, it seems pretty much entirely bug-free

Cons:
-This game is abandonware. Although bugs are *mostly* not present, the game has some major balancing issues that will sadly never be fixed. Worst of all - an achievement is literally impossible to complete - being only obtainable through a one-time event years ago. This is incredibly frustrating for completionists, and it means that I will be unable to ever reach 100% average completion on steam. Not every game can be patched forever, especially with such a small team - so the devs have my understanding, but I feel it necessary to know before you buy - (and if a dev ever reads this and has the ability to - please remove the achievement!)

-Balancing is strangely poor in places, difficulty suddenly spikes in certain areas, and the final boss is a ridiculous ramp up from every other challenge, meaning it's near-impossible to defeat with certain heroes, due to it instakilling heroes on normal difficulty (once one is down, the fight is pretty much over)

I feel like this could be fixed through possibly:
. increasing the health of the heroes (you can get unavoidably two-shot by the final boss within a matter of seconds, even with endgame gear)
.slight increases to the talent tree length and maximum level cap

-Many heroes are very similar to each other, and all except the knight feel squishy throughout the game. 4/8 heroes are ranged DPS, and the Marksman and Archer are practically identical, as are the Witch and the Warlock. The Shaman is interesting, but using her as the sole healer is impractical, as she can't provide the consistency of the Priestess, and if there's even a 5 second gap in healing, your Knight is likely to die.

but, as I said, i found it a fun experience, at least 5.5/10.

Cutesy artstyle tricks you into believing this'll be a fun experience, but this game has been a frustrating grindfest, with bosses that do not telegraph their most dangerous attacks, each encounter lasting at least three waves of enemies that give you no XP, and worst of all are the controls. why can't I have all the party members attack when I'm using the healer? and why can't I have a custom hotbar for my current party's skills instead of having to constantly switch them around just to use their skills while at the same time making sure that everyone doesn't die because using the healer means longer battles and more wrestling with the controls. I'm refunding this shit.

Here is a link to some gameplay so you can decide for yourself:
https://youtu.be/ncN7uqlxJ50

I really liked this game. It's simple, yet difficult. Cute, yet serious. But it immediately became a game killer when I spent 2 of my 5 hours just trying to beat the same boss over and over and then farming over and over to get stronger and then fighting the boss over and over again; unable to beat it. And you can't progress past this boss. I had to set the game to easy (which you can't undo) in order to progress.

PROS:
+ Nice simple bold graphics. Not Skyrim over here, but everything is crystal clear easy to see.
+ Lots of RPG elements. Combat, story and plot, quests, looting, crafting of sorts, vendors, etc.
+ Combat is fun real-time changing it up tactics.

CONS:
- It's very quick and easy to immediately get the highest tier gear, and it's super underwhelming.
- Not really much crafting crafting, besides somewhat upgrading gear a little.
- Little too much micromanagement needed and quick responses in combat, especially on healing. After you kill an enemy, you don't auto-attack the next; you have to assign everybody to attack again.
- Overall stats of characters are pretty low, and grow very slowly.
- Characters level VERY slowly. The past hour of farming, I've gone up only 1/2 a level, even with the bonus exp pet, and they aren't a high level...
- Don't expect to get the achievements for normal and hard difficulty without a LOT of grinding. Also, there's a couple achievements that are impossible to get now as well. It was for playing during the holidays.
- No map or mini-map.
- No way to know which quests are main quests and which are side quests (need to know for achievement purposes)

As I think of more PROS and CONS, I'll edit this review, until I complete the game.

I both love and hate this game... The mechanics are fun with a nice light storyline and some great game feel. I also like the cute accessible art style, but this is one of the games problems. The art style makes the game look light and fun, but its anything but, this game is hard as f**k. I'm not kidding when I say I have found Dark Souls to be easier.

This game has soooo many of the right elements I love, but is tuned too difficult for the visual wrapper it lives in. I suspect the designer played this game and tuned it during the entire development timeline, continually increasing difficulty to challenge himself (I have made this mistake :/ before). This is a great for him, but first time players gets brutally spanked. With some tuning to be more player friendly, and a fit for the aesthetic this game could be great for its price point. The down sides of this game are as follows;

1. Too hard, you need to be two levels above the recommend level for encounters to have a chance to win. Lower the default difficulty to be more player friendly.

2. Items that give you a fighting chance in combat drop rarely, or are super expensive to buy/craft requiring lots, and lots , and lots of tedious grinding. Suggest rare drops are 10-20% more plentiful or reduce item/craft cost. Grinding really hurt the game for me.

3. Characters and enemies often overlap making them a nightmare to select and target in this "plate spinning" game. Suggest you add character profiles for all the characters and health bars, that can be selected (selecting the character) and launch the spells from. The spell icons are huge and can be reduced and placed under the corresponding character.

4. Allow players to level up beyond 20 and get all the skills, this will help them get past the super hard encounters... eventually , where skilled player could do it naturally before maxing out all the skills. This way you make both causal and hardcore happy.

5. Lastly I suggest you allow players to keep experience and gold they get from defeats so even less skilled players can eventually overcome difficult challenges like we did on Ratchet and Clank.

Sorry for the long post, I wouldn't have gone to this trouble if I didn't think the game had potential. With a few tweaks this game could be a lot of fun, I will give it a thumbs up in hopes they address the three issues above that are holding it back.

P.S. Who ever painted the backgrounds, great job, really lovely color pallet.

Really an adventurous & humorous game, only thing I would've like to suggest is providing hints description for certain sidequest that seems to be troublesome as well for other characters/heroes to have some dialogues. Overall I enjoy playing this game^

Great looking game and made me surprisingly like a strategy game despite me not being a fan of the type. But the game seems like it should be a flash since you cant upgrade your equipment more than 3 times and leveling up doesn't increase your stats, also im just going to say this... Diffculty Spikes should be a tiny ramp with nails on it not, a mountain made out of broken glass. so basically needs to be significantly updated

Sentry Knight Tactics is a brutal game.

But it seems to happen more by carelessness, lack of QA and balancing - than by design.
This seems to be further supported by the about 6 freezes as well as minor bugs found during the playthrough.

After a few hours, you will find yourself controlling 4 separate characters, each with 3-4 abilities. You have to select and command and move them individually throughout the fights - although you can issue an "attack with all" order, you cannot select multiple units or move more than one at a time.

This is troublesome, as the fights in the game are either slugfests, where you easily dispatch the same groups of enemies repeatedly for up to 30 minutes, or plagued with combinations that will kill one of your 4 units in under 2 seconds if you're not paying close attention, which usually chain-reacts into defeat.


Although the game seems visually attractive and polished at first glance, a closer look makes the rushed parts stand out:

Terrible controls for microing 4 characters; problematic hitboxes, both in and out of combat; 2 of the 8 available characters are 80% copies of another, with different skill names; lack of real party diversity (there's only one tank - and one healer for 75% of the game); bosses that can 1-hit non-tank characters and change targets randomly after casting certain skills; loot dwindles as monsters become bullet-sponges and shop prices quadruplicate; "unique" effects on legendary items are most of the times completely useless even though items are not procedural; skill trees are laughable, with negligible values and effects all over the place (5% chance to avoid 50% damage! 10% healing on a skill with 30s cooldown!); consumables activate automatically and the vast majority of them are absolutely useless (single use: when you use your 30s skill, reduce its cooldown by 3!).



The more you play, the more you find - questionable design decisions are lurking around every corner - spoiling what could've easily been an amazing experience.

Perhaps you'd like to push forward, tredge through these issues to follow the adorable characters and their story to the end. Well, that's what I did - and yet here we are.

At first glance, I really enjoyed this game. But the longer I played, the more annoyed I got. There is no UI, so you cannot get any information about what is happening on-screen, once it is filled with stuff.

You got AOE and attack effects all over the screen, you got enemies and heros all over eachother in layers, making seeing HP bars very hard.

As a player, I cannot select the hero I want because I cannot see or click properly onto thier sprite.
Aslo, there is some kind of creeping UI mouse lag, that gets progressively worse in longer battles, making fast mouse selections and movement clicks either lag, or just simply not happen.

Its a good concept, but poorly presented, with some really annoying, play-impeeding UI bugs.

Cannot reccomend at this time, unless these issues are fixed.

Cute game burdened by huge short comings and shallow concepts.
You have to issue all commands, characters will only attack if being attacked or ar assigned a target manually.
Yet another game that refuses to acknowledge that combat formation has any purpose, enemies can walk through your party without worry. Units taking attacked in the back take no extra damage.
Speaking of formations, it gets tedious to unravel your party when they are piled on top of each other.
Characters will WASTE TIME goin around an enemy to attack on the other side instead of just killing them.
Feels like you can max out equipment too easy or soon.
You are limited to 4 characters while the enemy can have as many as 12 units on screen.
This is a baby sitters game, you have to baby sit your inventory, you have to baby sit your characters in battle. If you like this style of arcade click festing your units then this is the game for you. I hate games where you win or lose based on how fast you can click and issue orders.

Some people genuinely like this type of game, but if you are looking for somethign with more depth... look elsewear.

As a fan of the Sentry Knight flash games I marked this one as follow as soon as I saw it. It is on sale not and $8.99 is a pretty good price. Sometimes it's nice to play a game that does not require reading pages of instructions or going through a complex tutorial. I recommend this game. It's cute graphics are great to look at, (I have a GTX 1080)m and the story is simple enough to not overwhelm. I have enjoyed playing so far, and look forward to many more hours.


tl;dr: Cutsey rpg with weapon upgrades and simple character building. Nice simple time killer.