Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic

Gameplay

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic combines both the elements of Starflight and The Bard's Tale, and featured some innovations which set it apart from other games at the time. It was one of the pioneers in the budding sci-fi RPG genre.

The game is non-linear and allows players to ignore the entire plot and explore space for as long as they wanted. It mixes elements of an RPG with a space-shooter, requiring both strategy and tactics as the player would have to dog fight enemy vessels. Players can also choose to venture into trading by mining and harvesting resources on other planets. Much of the game also takes the players onto the ground, where they can fight ground battles using a wire-frame 3D display of their environment and engage in conversation, combat, or trade.

The main component of the game starts out in the dog fighting space combat scenario, fighting to protect merchant shipping. As the story progresses, other elements of the game, including exploration, trade, conversation, ship boarding, ground combat and investigation are brought into the mix. Players must balance their resources and cash with repairs from battle, buying new weapons and armor, and upgrading their vessel.

Setting

At the start of the game, the players are sent as part of a task force to combat a group of mysterious space raiders in the Caldorre system, who appear from nowhere to ravage merchant shipping in the area. Earlier efforts with battleships were ineffective against the light, agile raiders, so smaller Interceptor-class vessels with specially trained crews were dispatched to counter the threat and eventually end it. The Caldorre system has only three worlds—Caldorre itself, inhabited by a technologically advanced culture that dwells in huge towers on the planet's surface and service passing ships; Norjaenn, a frontier like world embroiled in a bitter war between rancher types and settler farmers over limited land space, and Ceyjavik, an icy world that is home to many exotic arctic animals and a small research station.

Reception

Scorpia in Computer Gaming World had mixed feelings about Sentinel Worlds. In 1988 she described the graphics, especially during takeoff and landing, as "the most exceptional use of EGA graphics I've seen yet in an adventure game", but criticized the slow movement speed both indoors and out, as well as the fact that only the team leader could be directly controlled, with the computer controlling the remainder of the team, sometimes poorly. Scorpia wrote in 1989, "Several have written to me, asking if there is more to the game than shooting down raider ships. There certainly is, but it will take awhile before the "real" action starts." In 1993 she called Sentinel Worlds "an interesting science-fiction CRPG" with a "good plot" but "terrible ending ... if you can live with that, this is a good game to play". Orson Scott Card was more positive, writing in Compute! that "no other game ... matches Sentinel Worlds for sheer depth". He praised the graphics and writing, which he compared to the "embarrassingly bad writing in the Ultima series".