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
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