Sentinels of Freedom Review

As I have mentioned many times before, I love card games of both the digital and tabletop variety. One of my favorites, and one I’ve likely tried to get you to play if you know me, is Sentinels of the Multiverse. Sentinels of the Multiverse is a fun, colorful cooperative card game in which players play as comic book super heroes working together to stop a villain’s nefarious scheme. It holds a special place in my heart because of its interesting and varied characters and engrossing world lore. Unfortunately, this quarantine has made it very difficult to play Sentinels of the Multiverse with my friends, and it’s not easy to convince them to purchase the digital version, so until last week I was out of luck. Thankfully, the developers at Underbite Games released Sentinels of Freedom and I was eager to get a look.

In Sentinels of Freedom, players create a hero of their own and join the titular team as they try to save the futuristic city of Megalopolis from a mysterious crime wave. The game plays a lot like the modern XCOM games, with each mission taking place on a specific battlefield but isn’t restricted to a grid system, instead allowing for free-form movement and attack areas. On each of the heroes’ turns during a mission, players take control of one hero and can move them around the battlefield and use various abilities and attacks, limited by that hero’s pool of action points. Depending on each hero’s stature and ability, some can do more than others with the same number of action points. A great example of this is at the super-speedy character Tachyon can move much farther with four action points than the character Bunker, as Bunker is weighed down by a massive mechanical suit. During each mission, the team of heroes must complete an objective, but that objective is something not related to combat, such as rescuing civilians, just as often as it is the straightforward goal of beating up all the bad guys. After each mission, the heroes regroup at their home base where players can rearrange the team’s members as well as equip the heroes with different abilities.

Without a doubt, the most impressive thing about Sentinels of Freedom is the incredibly expansive character creator. No super hero fantasy is complete without a self-insert character, and Sentinels of Freedom has an amazing number of options to let players create their own dream persona. The first thing players must choose are what powers their hero will have. From a pool of 12 power options, players can equip their hero with three, though only two can be used in any one mission. These powers include everything from martial arts to summoning minions, each with customization options changing aspects like attack animations and effect colors. After that, the player picks one to two personality traits from the available 20, which make minor adjustments to various character stats. In the same vein, players select their character’s backgrounds and the source of their power, again choosing one or two from a list of 20 each. Personally, I wish these three categories had more of an impact, something a little more flavorful like opening new conversation options or unique environmental interactions, but with so many different possibilities I understand why they had a minor impact. With all this decided, players design the look of their hero, choosing from over 200 options. Having that many choices, players can make just about any hero they can dream up, but I do wish there weren’t options limited only to masculine or feminine characters. The coolest surprise about the character creator is that, after completing the initial mission and getting a feel for the suite of powers they’ve chosen, players are able to remake their character in case there’s an aspect they don’t like. Appearance is fully customizable throughout the game, but it’s nice to be able to change powers after the first mission in case players don’t click with what they’ve picked.

Almost as interesting as the character creation is the gameplay, but unfortunately not all of it is good. I loved the grid-free style because it allowed me to move and act exactly how I wanted. I also really enjoyed the way different characters played, especially the way each hero acquired and used “special points.” Special points are used to indicate an ability has some resource requirement. This was excellent because Unity, a hero who uses metal in the environment to create robots shaped like dinosaurs and super heroes, was only able to acquire special points by using moves that stole them from enemies, evoking pulling metal from various sources, while Absolute Zero, a hero confined to a special low-temperature body suit, acquired the special points he needs to power his heat-based attacks by running his suit harder than is safe to build up heat in his capacitors. The system is incredibly flavorful and gives a great impression of how these heroes use their powers. However, not everything is so excellent in Sentinels of Freedom. My biggest issue with how Sentinels of Freedom plays is that they stuck a bit too much to the comic book super hero theme. Each attack is one of five types of attack: Thokk! Ping! Zaakt! Foom! and Spak! I get that these are comic book action onomatopoeia, but I honestly never understood what they were supposed to signify. This is a problem, because each of these five attack types had a different effectiveness against the five defense types, Soak, Evade, Block, Deflect, and Grit, but there’s no sense to what attacks work against what defenses. This system isn’t completely impenetrable thanks to a pop-up that will state the relative effectiveness of a selected attack against the chosen enemy that displays before the player confirms the choice, but still I needed some flavor to be sacrificed in the name of useability. Another big problem is that, when a hero is attacking an enemy, the projected chance to hit and potential damage is displayed in an entirely too small font. For the first few missions, I would have to squint my eyes just to find the combat prediction, until my eyes got used to finding the tiny alert.

Sadly, the problems with Sentinels of Freedom don’t stop there. Probably the biggest problem is that the character design doesn’t look very good. I’ve said before that I don’t know how to make a video game or how hard it is, but I will say the characters in Sentinels of Freedom look more like weird dolls than humans. I think this comes from trying to translate the exaggerated look of 2D comic books into a 3D game, because body proportions and facial expressions definitely look unreal. This could also be the result of this being only the second video game that developer Underbite Games have made. The effect isn’t as pronounced on characters with covered faces, so consider using a helmet or mask on your own hero to keep from being weirded out by your custom hero. Finally, a major issue with Sentinels of Freedom is that it does very little to teach players about the Sentinels world and lore that it relies so heavily on. To someone who has never played the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game or the Sentinels Comics tabletop role-playing game, there is no explanation for who the heroes, villains, and settings of this game are or why they should mean anything. Outsiders to the Sentinels games get no explanation on what Megalopolis is, why it’s noteworthy that Doomtrain and Ermine are working together or who those two are, or why there’s a tree named Akash’Flora in the middle of the city, and that’s only the lore that’s brought up in the first two or three missions. If this game wants to reach a wider audience than people who are already bought in to the Sentinels games, they need to have a much better onboarding process to the lore of the world this game occupies.

If I’m honest, I love Sentinels of Freedom, but I know that is in major part due to the fact that I’m already familiar with this franchise and am not much of a graphics snob. I think there’s a terrific tactical combat game here and anyone who likes turn-based RPGs or comic book super heroes should check it out, although there will be a steep learning curve to really get the game, and that’s just too big of a hurdle for a $25 game. Maybe once it’s released on a platform other than PC, they’ll have a debut sale, which would be an excellent time to get on board.

Buy this game on sale

It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking