Skip to content
Hyper Sentinel is a game that’s best to watch instead of waiting for me to try and describe it.
It’s a shoot-em-up that’s bright, colourful, loud, easy to pick up and play, and will hoover up hours of your time if you let it.
If it looks familiar, well, it’s perfect as a modern update to Uridium, and it’s a damn sight more forgiving as you fly about and could easily crash into barriers and die, but you can fly through them. The quick deaths were such an irritant in that game as you just wanted to blast everything to kingdom come, and that’s what you can do here. Yes, you can’t just fly without compunction, however, as your health will deteriorate when you take some damage, but think of it like having 9 lives instead of just one.
In short, just blast away anything that’s destructible, and once that’s done, the Guardian will arrive. No, not the tabloid rag, but a boss or two. They can be taken down, but with a fair bit of practice. Once done, the level’s structure will explode and it’s on to the next level.
For those not familiar with Uridium, it was the classic space shooter from Hewson, and while I was never brilliant at it, the ZX Spectrum version was written by a man called Dominic Robinson. I was once asked at school if that was me. I said yes. It wasn’t, though. I lied, just to wind someone up.
Hyper Sentinel is a huge amount of fun, but I have some issues with it.
Bizarrely, on my recording, you can see brief flashes of it going back to the Prague-adorned desktop (the big box being my Task Manager that was open). Quite why it’s showing this from recording nVidia’s Shadowplay, I don’t know. I have the PC showing on both my monitor and the TV, with the game playing on the latter. While playing the game, I’m NOT seeing those brief flashes. There’s also something not 100% with the game, since if I paused it and, for example, clicked on the Steam program or an open Windows Explorer folder on my monitor so I can check how my recording’s doing, the game crashes. Well, the game screen first disappears… then when I click on the toolbar icon to bring it back up, in case it’s minimised itself, it comes up on the monitor instead. I’ve absolutely no idea why.
Hence, when I’m playing it, I set the recording going from the TV, bring up the game, and play through a level. Then stop so I can check the recording, hence why the scores won’t tally as you check out consecutive gameplay videos.
I don’t have any of these problems on any other PC game. Hopefully, Huey Games can take a look at this and fix it, as I can see from the Steam page, that they are making regular updates to the game.
If those problems were absent, then this would be a solid 8, but for now, it’s 7.5/10. What marks it down, even to an 8? Well, while it’s difficult to score a 10 for a SHMUP, these games, by their very nature, can tend to be a bit repetitive, so while the levels do increase with difficulty, there are occasions when what makes a great fun, can also make it a little bit frustrating after an hour or so of gaming.
I do want to get this sorted out before I record more footage as the constant flick back to the desktop makes me feel I’m about to have an epileptic fit when I’ve never suffered from epilepsy!
I also had problems, early on, because an update to the game kept screwing up, and when I deleted it and reinstalled it, the download would keep pausing. This has been resolved, but I’ll describe the solution in case anyone else has come across this: Long story short, the problem appeared to be AVG getting in the way. I had to disable that to complete the download, but on re-enabling AVG, it tried to through the .exe into its quarantine, so I added an exception for it, with the option that next came up in AVG. Yes, AVG can be a pain, but it’s free and you do get more than what you pay for. An alternative is Norton, and that slows your PC down to a crawl…
NOTE: A mobile phone version has just been released in Beta form on Android, and you can see that below.
Overall: 7.5/10
Hyper Sentinel is around £12 and is out now on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
Important info:
- Developer: Huey Games
- Publisher: Huey Games
- Players: single player
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: None
(click on the image for the full-size version)
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.