Sentinella is a game that is so poor it wouldn’t have worked on the old-school Atari 2600. The premise is interesting, though.  You play this robotic tank entity who is programmed to defend a group of humans.  These humans do nothing but wander around in this black field all day, but there are aliens amongst them!  These aliens have infected the humans as well. 

The humans normally give off a blue aura, but if a human and an infected human are within close proximity of each other, they will both glow red.  That’s your cue that one is an alien.  But which one?  Which one?  That’s the tricky part.  To make it even more tricky, if two infected aliens are close to each other, they will give off a blue aura.  So the trick of the game is figuring out who’s human and who’s alien with process-of-elimination tactics, kind of like Minesweeper but in motion.   

Once you’ve figured out who the aliens are, then you can blast them.  Normally, that’s the most fun part of the game, but in Sentinella, it is a complete nuisance.  The only control used in the game is the space-bar, which fires your weapon.  Now, you’re probaly thinking that you use your arrow keys to aim, right?  Well, as Lex Luthor once profoundly put it: “Wrong!”  In Sentinella, your gun is constantly spinning.  The only thing that stops it is when you fire.

So you’re probably asking, how accurate is my targetting with controls like that?  Answer: terrible.  By the way, I forgot to mention that every once in a while UFOs show up and take the humans away.  It looks like you’re supposed to blast the UFOs, but it’s like being a sniper on a merry-go-round.  Not even Barry Pepper’s character from Saving Private Ryan could be on target with conditions like that. 

Oh yes, another thing I forgot to mention: if you try and hit an infected human and miss (that is, barely miss) the infected human will reveal its true nature and start going after other humans.  Assuming you can hit him, he’ll destroy us all.  Since my aim was so bad, these aliens were revealing themselves right and left. 

Unfortuntately, I could only play this game twice before I got frustrated with it.  I believe that there is something in video gamers that won’t let it go when we can’t win, a perseverence which would teach us to eventually go back, and adapt to the shooting system of Sentinella.  However, there are a lot of better games out there. 

If you think you can hack it, you can download it here. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 1:44 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.