SonnyJimbuk

Partly giving it a 7/10 because it's funny. Probably close to a 6 than an 8. I started skipping through all the dialogue and cutscenes at some point, and it markedly improved the experience. The main character has negative charisma and there are virtually no compelling narratives or interesting elements to latch onto, so personally I just didn't bother after a certain point. Gameplay-wise, this game tries a lot of unique stuff, which I can certainly respect. It features an odd blend of stealth, action, and open-world RPG elements, and I can safely say I haven't ever played a game quite like Seven before. The game feels good to control at a baseline, and the movement is intuitive and satisfying. A mechanic I really enjoyed was the "visa pills." The semi-open game world is split into 8 sectors, separated by gates, and to pass through a gate, you need the corresponding pill. There are many alternative options, though: you can also knock out an NPC that already has the pill and steal their DNA to temporarily mimic the effect of a pill, or, if you're crafty, you can simply find a way to jump over the gate. This mechanic is emblematic of what I would say is the game's greatest strength: the freedom of choice with which you can approach scenarios. Like many stealth games, you can either methodically sneak your way past everyone, simply kill whoever is in your path, or, my personal favorite, sprint through every area like a madman while making heavy use of the "Blink" ability, a short-ranged teleport that adds a lot of texture to the movement. However, there are many questionable design choices. The camera is locked to a fixed-angle, top-down perspective, which would be fine if not for the fact that the environments have a ton of verticality. This is a problem, because if there is a ceiling above you, it will not be visible until your character is basically bumping their head against it. This makes navigation frustrating, especially because many areas have a labyrinthine design with restrictive avenues for movement. It is very easy to get lost, and difficult to figure out how to get to objectives, even if you know where they are on the map. The progression system is also kind of nonsensical. There is no XP system, and instead, character upgrades tend to come in the form of discrete rewards, such as finding an item cache out in the open world. I personally prefer discretized rewards tied to specific actions to a nebulous number like XP, but Seven shoots itself in the foot, in that you can't use any of the upgrades you find until you've obtained the thing that they upgrade, which you can only obtain by progressing the main story. This heavily incentivizes you to blitz through the main story first before exploring, which I find personally unsatisfying and antithetical to the appeal of open-world games. Although it's rough around the edges, I'd personally recommend trying Seven out if you're curious. At the very least, it tries to do something different and has a lot of elements to appreciate.

Tries to emulate the tough but fair gameplay of the NES Castlevania entries, but lacks fangs. Although it is operating from a solid mechanical baseline, it fails to iterate properly upon its enemy placement and level design in order to provide a satisfying ramp of challenge. Enemies mostly attack you one at a time from predictable angles, with clear-cut ways of avoiding their attacks, meaning many encounters boil down to a rote test of hitting the right button at the right time. For me, this compares unfavorably to the original Castlevania, which used a formula of introducing enemies one at a time in a controlled environment, then later ramped up the difficulty by throwing a combination of several enemy types and tricky platform layouts at you all at once.