The merchants who live on the three planets of the Caldorre star system have been recently assaulted and robbed by groups of mysterious space raiders. Giant battleships were set to eliminate the threat; however, the raiders proved to be too agile, dodging them easily. A smaller, interceptor-class vessel is now dispatched to Caldorre to deal with the problem.
Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic is an open-ended sci-fi role-playing game. It has a combination of role-playing character building, customizable spaceship combat, and exploration. The player will guide his team, flying through space and exploring the surfaces and bases of a few planets to unravel the mystery that’s disturbing the known universe.
The game opens with a mission to protect a merchant shipment, which involves space combat against enemy ships. Afterwards, the player is free to explore the planets, mining them for resources, talking to characters to receive clues, trading, acquiring better weapons and armor for the crew, and upgrading the space ship.
The player can use a pre-generated party of five characters or create them from scratch, rolling their attributes. There are five character classes, but they have little impact on ground combat, with the exception of the communicator officer, who interacts with NPCs, and the medic, who has access to healing abilities. Characters also have skills, including various weapon proficiencies as well as communication skills such as bribery. Skills can be increased when characters level up.
Space travel, combat, and planet exploration are done in 2D. The player can land in any spot on the three planets of the star system and explore them by navigating an armored ground vehicle. Certain structures can be entered. At that point the game switches to 3D vector graphics, though the party, NPCs and enemies are always superimposed on the radar. Both space and ground combat in the game proceed in real time. In indoor locations the player directly controls only the party leader, while the AI manages the actions of the others.
The game features “paragraph books”, where characters mention a paragraph number to read from the booklet, instead of getting the text in-game. This functions as copy protection, making the game require guesswork to complete without the manual.
