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The Prologue Update

SENTRY · Community Announcements · September 17, 2026

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Hi everyone, we’ve released Major Update 5! All the additions and changes are listed below but a quick thank-you to everyone that played the betas and provided feedback – the help is invaluable and greatly appreciated!


The version number for the update is 0.91.29753 or later – check the bottom-right of the main menu to be sure you’ve got the latest.

As usual your profile saves will carry over (i.e. all your equipment, uniform and campaign unlocks), but any in-progress escape run will not – so if you’re in the middle of a campaign and you don’t want to lose any new blueprints you haven’t banked, reach a gate and bank them before switching to the new version. If you want to sync to the previous version to finish a run, we’ve archived MU4 as a beta branch (called "0.9.27757 - Major Update 4").

And now onto the exciting bits…

Prologue!


We’ve redone the start of the game to include a narrative campaign. We felt this important for three reasons:
The new prologue should greatly improve all those aspects (and was fun for us to make, too!)

The Prologue is split into two sections. The first tells the story of the initial moments of the invasion from the perspective of an engineer on a space station orbiting Earth. The surprise attack wiped out the main resistance aside from a backup system that needs to be activated: The SENTRY Defense Program. We refer to this part as “The Listening Post”.


The second part focuses on navigating to and destroying an alien device that is sat next to a Jump Gate, preventing escape from the system. Completing this will allow the Initiate campaign evacuation effort to commence. We call this section “Operation Pilot Light”.


We previously didn’t allow co-op until you’d completed the original tutorial – which took about 40 minutes. We now unlock co-op when you reach Operation Pilot Light, so if you and a friend got the game to play together you’ll be able to do so a lot sooner (once you’ve finished The Listening Post, which is about 15 minutes).

While new players will naturally see the Prologue, we’ve worked hard to make sure it’s a fun experience even for those who are familiar with SENTRY or interested in the surrounding lore/universe we’ve built – if you already own the game and want to play it, just create a new profile.

Difficulty Modes!


We get a broad variety of feedback regarding difficulty, with a lot of people saying the game is too easy with even more finding it too hard.

For that latter camp, one aspect of addressing this is the introduction of the Prologue. The other way we’re tackling this wide range of difficulty requirements is the addition of new modes that you’ll select when you start a mission.


These choices not only affect the “Threat Level” (i.e. base difficulty) of the boarding parties you encounter, but a variety of modifiers too. These break down as follows:
Adding difficulty modes gave us the opportunity to make the ship launch menu look a lot nicer too :)

Operator Enemy Behaviour Overhaul!


The “Operators” are the term we use for the three most common enemy types. The melee-weapon carrying Scrappers, alien pistol/shotgun/burst/assault rifle wielding Raiders, and the alien minigun or shield bearing Assault/Storm Wardens.

Each of these had three tier variants (i.e. the “grunt” grey ones, the “veteran” blue versions and the “elite” red ones). Previously, the main differentiator between them was health, aggressiveness and where you’d face them in a campaign.

These have all had a major rework and our guiding principle has been to:

  1. Make the grunts feel like they occupy more of a cannon-fodder role
  2. Add increasing amounts of behaviour throughout the tier levels
  3. Provide different behaviour per weapon, per tier
This allows us to escalate the behaviour across a campaign, providing a greater feeling of combat variety as you play through each sector. It also ties into the new difficulty modes, so you’re going to see more Veterans and Elites in Hardcore compared to other difficulties, more Grunts in Casual etc.

First up we’ll delve into the Scrappers. We’ve given each tier a different weapon to reflect their behaviour:


Grunts wield a simple club and only perform melee attacks. They won’t dodge when under fire either. The Veteran will have similar behaviour to what you’d be used to in the original game, so they will dodge to the side, perform ranged attacks and do the charging uppercut. The Elite will have more aggressive attack behaviour, will evade grenades and at low health can become enraged – at which point they’ll forgo some of their more advanced behaviour and become focused on melee-ing you. We also made different animation sets to further distinguish their tiers so they’re easier to read in battle.

For the Raiders, each tier can carry any weapon – so first up was making them more distinctive depending on what they’re equipped with:


You sometimes couldn’t parse this in the heat of battle, often only registering what weapon they had when they’re already fired it at you. This change makes them more recognisable so you can react accordingly.

Regarding their behaviour:

(Oh and while I’m on the subject of grenades, you may remember that if you throw one and catch a bullet as it left your hand it would blow up in your face. We’ve fixed that now.)

Moving on to the Wardens, they’re split into two types. Storm Wardens wield the shield and flak pistol, while Assault Wardens carry the Plasma Minigun.

The Elite Assault Wardens have gained a spin attack at melee range, while the Veteran and Elite Storm Wardens can initiate a shield charge. The Elites can also perform a rallying cry that makes nearby enemies immune to stagger.


New Enemy!


Speaking of enemies, we’ve added the Bile Pod to the roster. These aren’t traditional enemies that enter via breach points. Instead, these are spawned into levels as a hazard.

They are positioned on the floor and ceilings and are fixed in place. If you get too close to them they enter an alert state – get even closer and they’ll detonate, causing damage within a radius.

You can attack them, but they’ll only enter a dormant state for a period of time before reviving. They also prevent deployables being placed on them, so when these are active in a level you’ll not only have to be mindful of running around freely, but also where you position your traps.


Gamepad Support!


We’ve now implemented gamepad support on all menus and done a pass on the combat controls, too.

Right now the game doesn’t auto-detect which gamepad you’ve plugged in (or if you’re using Steam Deck) but if you’re using a PS5 pad or are on Deck, you can go to the settings menu and adjust the Input Prompt Display to show the buttons for those formats.

Other noteworthy additions!


I’ll put the list of miscellaneous changes in the section at the bottom, but there are some other areas that are worth calling out.

First up is the new Loadout Specialities system. At the start of each mission you can influence the equipment you get assigned by choosing a speciality:


A “Balanced” Speciality is the traditional choice you’re used to in SENTRY, but the following have been added:
When you make your choice, you’ll then be shown the equipment you’ve been assigned from the pool you’ve previously banked, but now at least you have some say in how you want to shape your upcoming run.

Aside from the Balanced Speciality, each of the new ones have unlock requirements based around the equipment you’ve banked.

Another area we’ve been reworking is Turrets.


Much like difficulty, we get a lot of conflicting feedback around turrets. Some people find them too weak, whereas others find them overpowered.

Learning good placement is crucial for getting the most out of turrets – and that’ll never change. Bad placement will always mean turrets underperform. However optimal placement should not allow you to AFK while they take care of an entire boarding party!

With those thoughts in our mind, we’ve made the following changes:
Next up is the concept of merged boarding parties. If two enemy boarding parties were due to attack the same level they’d attack it one after the other. This meant you’d have to fight two battles in the same location, which could become repetitive. We’ve changed this so that they now merge, meaning you have to fight a single but tougher battle with double the hazards instead.


And last up of the big additions is the Enemy Path Preview.

This has been a popular community request and something we experimented with a long time ago (before the game even released!) but a combination of the visuals and enemy behaviour at the time resulted in a very flat feeling combat experience. This surprised us, but sometimes prototypes don’t work out so we moved on from the idea and filed it away as something to revisit in the future.

Anyway, our latest attempts were much more successful without any of the negative effects we experienced previously, so you’ll now see an enemy path preview during each Preparation Phase:


The path preview will turn red if the enemies are blocked by a closed door with no alternative routes.

Oh and for those that want it old-school, there’s a setting in the Options Menu to disable this if you want.

Other Stuff!


There’s a huge amount of other changes that have gone into this Major Update which you can find below…

Levels:
Equipment:
Tech:
Enemies:


Campaign:
Audio:
Miscellaneous:
Bug-fixes:



Phew! Thanks for reading this far! Please keep sending us your feedback as it’s immensely helpful. We log everything into a big tracker to help shape our future work, a lot of which you can see reflected in this major update.

The next big update we’re planning is the full release one. We’ve been gradually doing passes and reworking most major systems and there’s a few left that haven’t received this treatment yet – we’ll of course share our plans for these through the monthly Dev Transmissions. In the short term we’ll keep an eye on anything that may be suitable for a patch – and once the translators have done their work we’ll update the non-English languages too.

As ever, we hope you like the latest Major Update and we massively appreciate your support :)

The Fireblade Crew



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This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of SENTRY on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.