Interstellar Sentinel

Interstellar Sentinel is a side-scrolling shoot ’em up in which you play as DrBossKey, the Interstellar Sentinel. With your crew and starship Veil Piercer, you travel to a new world to fight the Demonic Horde, collect the souls of defeated enemies and turn them into living weapons to restore balance to the cosmos.

The game spans 8 levels, with secrets to find, bosses to face and a difficulty curve that grows as you progress. You can choose from Casual, Normy and Heroic difficulty, and select any level to play or practice from the start. A playthrough takes about an hour.

Weapons and combat

You switch rapidly between 19 weapon sets, each with an Auto Shot, Rapid Shot and Power Shot. The three weapon types give you different options: Auto Shots can deal near-field damage or use homing missiles and plasma stasis fields, while Power Shots charge up to deliver shots described as 10 times more powerful than Rapid Shots, often with piercing. Positioning DrBossKey in relation to the Gun Portal weapon points lets you use techniques such as point blanking and lining up Power Shots.

Defeated enemies release soul essence that charges your super weapon. It can create temporary invulnerability, cancel enemy bullets for higher score rewards, and produce Monster Star Gems to collect for bonus points. Releasing stored soul essence can also restore it, allowing you to chain supers together. Your wingsuit reactor core is vulnerable, but the suit can take a hit, including as part of a strategy, and Pacifist Mode challenges in each level ask you to survive; completing one grants higher-tier weapon-set drops, an extra life and a temporary core shield hit point.

You can downgrade your weapon sets to keep a preferred loadout for a situation. Dumping weapons also maintains your chain combo, adding a risk-and-reward choice to the weapon system. Your base weapons remain powerful, so losing a weapon set does not leave you with weak basic attacks.

Enemies and progression

The game features over 40 hand-drawn, animated enemies with custom death animations. Its Monster Trophy system changes encounters as you improve: clearing enemies and earning high scores produces Monster Trophies, which spawn more challenging and distinctive foes, including hidden minibosses across the levels. Defeating a Monster Trophy earns a medal that powers up your Chain Combo meter, while a hint system indicates how much more the system has to reveal.

The Chain Combo begins when you destroy enemies. To keep it going, you must destroy another enemy within 6 seconds, building your score and potential rewards. End-of-level rankings range from D to S+ and drive dynamic challenges and minibosses, with the possibility of unlocking secrets. The score system factors in chain combos, Monster Trophy medals, boss time bonuses, rewards, power-ups and survival; accumulated points also serve as extra lives and a path to advanced gameplay rewards.

Game modes

In addition to the main game, you can play a 5 Minute Caravan score attack, take on unique boss encounters in the 9 Hells Boss Rush, or race in Race Mode. The game also has a local high-score leaderboard, where you can record your initials as you pursue high scores, S+ ranks and a one-credit clear.

Bosses and secrets

Boss encounters include a kaiju demon in space and an interdimensional being called the Astral Ripper. Each level has a secret to find, with rewards for testing your piloting skills. The soundtrack runs for 58 minutes and features synth chip-tune music composed by Chris Huelsbeck.