"A convoluted, messy story combines with bad design, enfuriating gameplay and unimpressive sound and graphics - don't bother with this game"

The story follows two people. Jigoku, who is a tough, hard talking sword wielder who wields the 7 blades of the game's title, and Oyuri who uses pistols, shotguns, machineguns, and grenade launchers. The story follows their journey to find the Golden Dragon…and going into any more depth than that would mean you'd have experience first hand the convoluted, messy nature of the storyline – something no man should have to experience. The characters in the storyline try to be cool but it all just falls flat on its face when they try and have humour going at the same time. To make it worse the humour just is not funny.

The game allows you to play as both Jigoku and Oyuri both of whom have completely unique fighting systems. Jigoku uses a variety of blades however his attacks aren't very varied. All you have available to you is a sword hit, a kick, a running kick, a jumping swipe and a weapon specific attack for each weapon. The lack of variety in attacks results in you using the same attacks over and over and ultimately getting rather bored. Oyuri uses guns, and though she has several guns available to her there's only one you'll be using which involves locking-on, shooting 4 bullets and then dodging attacks whilst you reload your gun. You'll do this over and over again and again. It really is quite uninteresting.

As Jigoku if you're fighting the fodder you find pilled up in the level you're ridiculously overpowered and can't be touched. The moment you go against any tough enemies you'll get ganged up on and hit without any chance to retaliate. Oyuri uses her lock-on mechanism a lot with L1 but you can only lock on to enemies you're already looking at and sometimes the game will just refuse to lock-on. Alternatively you can press the SELECT button and enter the First-Person mode. The controls are incredibly twitchy in this mode and you are left completely vulnerable whilst in this mode.

The story is bad, the gameplay is bad…the design doesn't save this game. For a start most of the levels are very linear. When I say linear I quite literally mean just running in a straight line. Sometimes you'll see places on your left or right that you should be able to go onto, but often these places are off limits. Most of the enemies won't stop you and you can just run straight past them without fighting them. To add insult to lack of injury there is little variety in enemy design – expect to see crowds of 20 of the same enemy.

The graphics really aren't very good at all. They look only slightly better than late PSX quality. The environments in particular look very ugly – I was in a forest were trees were completely cylindrical badly textured grainy messes. The sound effects are VERY basic and will probably get on your nerves, meanwhile the music is annoyingly basic and rather boring considering the game tries (and fails) to be fast paced.

Story = 2/10
Gameplay = 3/10
Design = 2/10
Graphics = 4/10
Sound = 4/10

Final Score = 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 01/08/08

Game Release: Seven Blades (EU, 09/28/01)