Sentinels of the Multiverse

 PC
User Score
8.0

Generally favorable reviews- based on 12 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 12
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 12
  3. Negative: 2 out of 12

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  1. Oddrob13
    Jan 11, 2017
    9
    Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative card game in which you control a team of superheroes fighting to defeat a supervillain in an Avengers-esque crossover. The heroes are from Sentinels Comics, which is an imaginary comics publisher, though many of the heroes are heavily inspired by heroes from Marvel and DC. The video game is a direct adaptation of that card game. In this review,Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative card game in which you control a team of superheroes fighting to defeat a supervillain in an Avengers-esque crossover. The heroes are from Sentinels Comics, which is an imaginary comics publisher, though many of the heroes are heavily inspired by heroes from Marvel and DC. The video game is a direct adaptation of that card game. In this review, I'll be looking at the game primarily from the perspective of having the expansions. As of writing, I have 225 hours played.

    One of the first things I think Handelabra deserves praise for is translating the card game, which is fiddly and requires a lot of bookkeeping, into a video game with easy-to-navigate, intuitive UI. In game you can get all information easily within one or two clicks, and the information is organized in an easy to read and decipher format. When this game first released, I did not purchase it because I didn't think that it was conceivably possible to make any kind of decent UI for the game to translate into. Handelabra exceeded that and made an actively good UI. The only minor complaints I have about the UI is that on the hero and villain selection screens, the characters are arranged in a horizontal row, rather than opening up some sort of grid view with a larger number of characters on it and for some reason attempting to use the scroll wheel on my mouse to navigate up and down doesn't scroll very far, so it's just easier to move normally (I did not have this problem when playing on my Macbook).

    Having established that the game is a good adaptation of the card game, we still need to determine whether it's a good game in it's own right. As mentioned before, you play as a team of Heroes fighting a singular villain (with some exceptions) in an environment that affects the battle. The diversity in the heroes, villains, and environments, even in just the base set, is pretty impressive. No two heroes play alike, and this is made even more impressive when you add in all the current expansions, bringing the total number of heroes to 26, villains to 24, and environments to 18. No two heroes play alike, and while some villains utilize a sort-of basic main-villain-and-his-minions style, even those are significantly varied in their difficulty, and even each of those adds some twist that changes how you should strategize against them, and each villain also has an advanced mode to add further challenge. I think this game also deserves praise for having each character feel appropriate to the theme of that hero. Legacy (a sort of hybrid Superman/Captain America) gives bonuses to his allies and can prevent them from being harmed. The Wraith (Batman analogue) relies on her equipment to deal with enemies. The only hero I don't think feels exceptionally thematic in her gameplay is Expatriette (Punisher-esque). She has guns, but they all just deal different amounts and distributions of damage. She can load ammo cards into her guns, but it just doesn't quite feel right like the rest of the heroes.

    For the most part, each of the heroes are usually fun to play and each of the villains are usually fun to play against (except Spite and Wager Master, who can still be fun, but are usually not.) All of the environments are great. As with any card game things can go wrong, and you will occasionally have bad games where heroes do nothing because of horrible hero draws or villain plays, but I don't know any card game that is not like that, and this can be mitigated to some degree in Sentinels by skipping your turn to draw more cards which is at least a nice mechanic more card games could learn to utilize.

    There is one overall issue with Sentinels, but it is mitigatable. The issue is that Sentinels of the Multiverse can often be a very easy game. Every villain has some hero or combination of heroes that just wrecks them. Because of this, you kind-of have to make your own fun, and put teams of heroes with villains to make games balanced. There are two things that mitigate this issue however. First there is a handy difficulty score sheet, with expected win rate, her: http://x.gray.org/sentinels-of-the-multiverse-difficulty-scores.html and secondly, Handelabra does a Weekly One-Shot which is a usually preset game that tends to present a greater challenge than most other games. In addition, you can get different quality covers depending on how many tries you take to beat it and if you beat it the week it comes out. Because these two resources are available (though one is outside the game), I think it sustantially mitigates what I see as the only significant flaw in the game overall.

    Because of that, I would give Sentinels a 9/10 with expansions, and an 8/10 without.    … Expand
  2. TitaniumDragon
    Mar 12, 2016
    2
    Sentinels of the Multiverse is a computer card game. In it, you control a group of heroes, and you combat a villain. The game is represented by cards – each character is a card, with their own power and hit points, and their own unique deck. The game proceeds by having the villain (controlled by an AI) play, then the heroes play, with each hero having their own hand of cards, and thenSentinels of the Multiverse is a computer card game. In it, you control a group of heroes, and you combat a villain. The game is represented by cards – each character is a card, with their own power and hit points, and their own unique deck. The game proceeds by having the villain (controlled by an AI) play, then the heroes play, with each hero having their own hand of cards, and then having the environment (again controlled by an AI) play.

    The gameplay is about what you’d expect out of something like this, and all in all, the decks of the various characters are reasonably interesting. The villain throws something at the heroes every turn, be it some sort of attack, a minion, something which blocks their progress, ect. Sometimes, the villain card itself will attack as well on top of whatever the card they drew doing.

    Likewise, each of the player characters in their own turn gets to play a card, then use a power, and finally draw a card. This power can either be the power on their card, or a power on a card they played. Some cards give passive bonuses, some are powers which have to be activated during the power turn, and some just are a one-shot ability which does something.

    The environment basically does stuff to help or impair the heroes and villains. Some of the cards are really disadvantageous for the heroes, some hurt the villains, some do very little, some are easily gotten rid of, and some are very deadly.

    While all of this is reasonable enough, it becomes clear very quickly that the game is short on content. The game comes with ten heroes, four villains, and four environments. Given you can play with up to 5 heroes every round, you’re really looking at only a handful of games before you run out of new content. There is an “advanced” mode for the villains, but it is really ultimately just a minor tweak which ups the villains’ difficulty rather than giving a real burst of new content.

    But there are packs of heroes and villains which can be purchased as DLC…

    And that’s really what this is – the base game is basically a demo for the “full game”. You can buy the season 1 DLC pack for as much as the base price of the game ($20 right now) which greatly increases the content – overall adding 8 new heroes, 14 new villains, and 8 new environments. The base game experience just isn’t very varied, and you will likely quickly become bored with fighting the villains after one or two times.

    There isn’t really a story or anything else – while there are character background pages, expecting any story beyond that will leave you disappointed. And while there is a new weekly challenge every week, most of them require the DLC, and in any case, they’re just the standard scenarios, just with preset villains and hero sets – and as far as I can tell, none of them really incorporate stories or anything special like that.

    Really, then, this isn’t a complete game without the DLC – so expect to spend as much as the base game + the DLC, meaning this is basically a $40 game, not $20. At the sort of price range they’re asking for, I don’t think this game is really worth it – frankly, I got about three hours of vague interest out of it, followed by about five hours of achievement hunting and the realization that I wasn’t really having fun anymore.

    Overall, I don’t think that spending the extra money is really going to make it all that much more fun – just increase the amount of time you spend on it being vaguely amused at best. There are just so many more games out there which try so much more to make you happy, I just can’t really say that you’d be justified spending your time on this one. It isn’t awful, and it is an okay-designed card game, but there’s just nothing special about it.    … Expand
  3. Sonvar
    Jan 10, 2017
    9
    This is a faithful adaptation of the board game of the same name. The base game includes the same content you would get buying the physical version and a bit more. The game offers access to variant versions of each of the ten heroes included and a variant of two of the villains. The expansions can be bought through a Season Passes or individually depending on your preference. ReallyThis is a faithful adaptation of the board game of the same name. The base game includes the same content you would get buying the physical version and a bit more. The game offers access to variant versions of each of the ten heroes included and a variant of two of the villains. The expansions can be bought through a Season Passes or individually depending on your preference. Really the best part for me is being able to play this game solo so I can face challenges my board gaming group isn't as inclined to do.… Expand
  4. CriticalHit20
    Dec 24, 2019
    7
    I've played the board game and was pretty good at it. I lost to the tutorial. I swapped one member of that team and accidentally played Baron Blade on advance and failed agaon. I played a third time and won on the last turn. If I didn't kill him that turn, I was sure to lose the next turn as my remaining hero only had 3 hit points. I looked up my scenarions on the Sotm difficultyI've played the board game and was pretty good at it. I lost to the tutorial. I swapped one member of that team and accidentally played Baron Blade on advance and failed agaon. I played a third time and won on the last turn. If I didn't kill him that turn, I was sure to lose the next turn as my remaining hero only had 3 hit points. I looked up my scenarions on the Sotm difficulty calculator and I had over 90% of winning each of those games. To lose all 3 is 1/10^3 or 1/1000.
    When I lost those games, it was very frustrating. The game was slow. My free time is precious and I just spent 2 hours on a game and lost. Was it at least fun during the losses. No! It felt like being smacked around and brutalized. It was a combination of unfamiliarity of the cards Baron Blade as well as extremely bad luck as I thought I played 85% optimally during those 3 games.
    Easier victories came later using 5 players against Citizen Dawn, Grand Warlord Voss and Omnitron. These were all comfortable victories with all the heros averaging 20+ hit points in the first scenario and the teens in the last one. Still, there was times I was thinking, you got to be kidding me, when some card makes you discard all your cards or destroy all your played cards or a whole bunch of minions, devices, etc. comes out and attacks all your heros doing massive damage. Even in winning, the opponent was annoying. I decided to delete the game when playing a game against Citizen Dawn and she went into sun mode and was invincible until 4 citiziens are there to start a round. For 2 turns, I did nothing and when she start the turn with 4 citizens and changed back, she added 3 more and must have did over 50 points of damage in total to my heores in that one round. These minions say destroy this, destory that, discard cards. If there was a table, mild-mannered and cool-headed me would have flipped the table.
    It is also a lot of work playing all 4 or 5 characters as you have to do a lot of analysis to be efficient so the game is slow.
    Thus, if you win and it was easy, it is not that satisfying except for the first time. If you win and it was hard, it is not fun or satisfying and one simply thinks the cards are unfair. If you lose, you don't laugh it off and say at least I had a good time, you go into this sour mood. Because you want to avoid that sour mood, you'll play games with high chance of success and not want to gamble with your time.
    Card comes out? destroy all played cards, discard 2 cards, all heros take 5 damage. WTF! Eff this stupid f*cking game.    … Expand

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  1. Riot Pixels
    Jan 25, 2015
    65
    It will take you just a couple of days to try every character, go everywhere and conquer everyone. Without a decent single-player campaign, there is no incentive to come back and save the Multiverse again.
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