Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia review – Slashing and slashing, never hacking

Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia uses a wealth of varying ideas. Unfortunately, each idea feels like it’s still just an idea and not a fully formed concept.

Developer: NatsumeAtari
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Platform: PS4 (version reviewed), PC
Release Date: February 9, 2018

Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia is an arena fighting game based on the popular anime and manga franchise Seven Deadly Sins. The series has over 250 chapters and that number is only growing by the week. Knights of Britannia can’t cover all that material, but the game’s story mode covers around the first 100 chapters, and the developer is sprinkling in a little bit more later on with free DLC.

Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia uses all of that content to create a wealth of varying gameplay ideas. Unfortunately, each idea feels like it’s still just an idea and not a fully formed concept, which becomes the downfall of this game with clever innovations, but little follow through.

Story mode at launch lets you play as the titular Seven Deadly Sins, a group of heroes with a soured reputation causing them to be labeled as outlaws. They’ve spent quite some time laying low; now they’re slowly but surely returning back into the spotlight. The game takes place in a medievalesque setting, so outlaws are par for the course. Story mode uses this idea of their return fantastically as a method to unlock levels. You’re rated on the variety of moves used and the amount of mayhem caused; your actions literally make you the talk of the town. Levels are unlocked by having more gossip and rumors spread about you.  It’s an ingenious idea that takes advantage of the setting in an interesting way, I only wish I could say that about more things in Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia.

What remains after that single feature is a rather by-the-book anime arena fighting game that feels like it saw what other anime games were doing and simply replied with “ditto,” while adding nothing of relevance to the concept. The story mode is fairly boilerplate at best. It features a variety of recreated scenes from the anime with much of the nuance left on the cutting room floor. Unless you’re a fan of the show, it will be very difficult to keep up with what’s going on.

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The main way of going from mission to mission is via an overworld map where you travel as a giant pig named Hawk Mama who houses the Seven Deadly Sins on her back. This method does a great job of showing how expansive the world is and illustrating the scale of what you’re dealing with. But this is hardly ever put to good use as it’s a huge slog to travel to your next mission. The giant pig you’re mounted atop moves as quickly as you might expect from a pig… extraordinary slow. Given its status as a pig, this would have been absolutely fine, except speeding up your traversal time is actually an unlockable ability, making travel torturously slow until that extra speed is unlocked. To add insult to injury, the world itself is absolutely barren. It can sometimes take full minutes after departing a place before running into anything of interest again.

Things of interest include missions and battles, which to the game’s credit they do attempt to vary by letting you play as other characters during side missions. Unfortunately, two of the most frequent side missions are ones where you play as Hawk and Elizabeth. In the Hawk missions, you play as Mama Hawk’s son, who is also a pig. Unlike his mom, he’s a tiny normal sized pig who has a hard time getting around the map and features awkward attack patterns.

Matches are dominated by whoever can use their ultimate ability first, so rather than being an epic clash of two hearts, fights are often wars of attrition both offline and online.

Luckily, Elizabeth’s missions don’t have any issue with awkward attacks, because she doesn’t attack anything at all. Her missions are what can only be described as reverse escort missions where you gather an increasing amount of items while Hawk protects you from enemy attacks. It was just incredibly frustrating to go through, especially when these reverse escort missions make up a hefty number of all side missions.  

There are, however, some side missions where you play as the villain faction, the Holy Knights. These missions act as a pleasant break from your regular cast of characters; some even add a bit of perspective to the main storyline. The characters are fun to play as, I just wish their missions weren’t as repetitive. Most of them consist of “defeat this group of seven foes” where the only thing changing is the number of foes.

Other than story mode, the game totes another mode: duel mode. Here, every major story mode character is playable, allowing you to pit them against other characters for a 1v1 matchup. Unfortunately, that’s hardly an exciting experience. Many fights feel like they’re a game of luck rather than skill. Taking the fight online doesn’t change much either. Matches are dominated by whoever can use their ultimate ability first, so rather than being an epic clash of two hearts, fights are often wars of attrition both offline and online.

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Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia can be fun at times, but it’s often little more than an anime arena fighter. New fans will have a hard time getting into it. The story mode plays out in very broad strokes, only including the absolutely most necessary details to still be considered coherent. The story may not be great but the mode does include some interesting features such as the gossip unlocking system. Outside of story the only thing you can do is play fairly repetitive one on one fights in duel mode. I’d only recommend purchasing Seven Deadly Sins: Knights of Britannia to fans who already adore the world and just want to see more of their favorite characters. Otherwise, this game might feel a little lacking in substance.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.