Use towers, traps, and guns to repel spaceship boarders in tower defense-shooter hybrid Sentry

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An indie tower defense/shooter hybrid that hit Steam Early Access late last month is getting pretty positive reviews from early players. In Sentry your job is to defend a ship of frozen human survivors fleeing alien attack by setting up a gauntlet of traps, tricks, and environmental hazards between enemy boarders and the energy core of your ship.

Sentry's also an first-person shooter hybrid, letting you use a variety of guns to blow out enemy weak points, or convenient windows, to defeat the oncoming horde. It's just singleplayer for now, but Sentry plans to add two player co-op in the future.

You might remember Sentry from its trailer a couple years back.

Individual levels aside, Sentry is set up on a node-based map like a lot of popular roguelikes. As your ship moves from place to place, dodging enemies and hazards, you're able to snatch usable stasis pods and equipment for your defensive works. I especially like that Sentry intends to let you use sucessive lines of defense—closing a heavy door to buy time and let you set up new turrets and traps behind it.

"Should your SENTRY fall in battle, death is not the end. Another member of the crew will be thawed from stasis by the SENTRY Defense Program, ready to continue the fight. Even if you fail to defend a level, defeat only changes the strategic landscape in the Ship Overview, forcing you to make new decisions on where to make your next defiant stand. As long as there is a surviving SENTRY and the Core remains operational, your skills in combat mean victory can always be grasped from the jaws of defeat," say developers Fireblade Software.

Fireblade Software is an indie developer that previously made 2019 oceanfaring adventure Abandon Ship.

You can find Sentry on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.