David Sanders
David SandersThere’s an elephant in the room that I want to address right up front. Sin Slayers, as it originally existed when I received a review key for it years ago, appears to have since been removed from sale on Steam. The developer and publisher of Sin Slayers, Goonswarm, seems to have re-released Sin Slayers on Steam in late 2024 with the added subtitle Reign of the 8th. However, I didn’t receive a review key for the new version and I don’t intend to purchase a copy, so I’m afraid the best I can do is discuss the version that no longer exists.
In Sin Slayers, demons that physically embody the so-called “Seven Deadly Sins” and all their hellish underlings have invaded the realm of the living. It seems the demons can’t bear to be on holy ground, which has caused an ancient church in a forest clearing to become the sole remaining sanctuary for humanity. Several adventurers who consider themselves strong enough to repel the attacking demonic forces have been drawn to this church. The elderly sage who has long inhabited the church encourages these adventurers to work together, so they begin using the church as a base of operations for a counterattack.
You’ll control a group of up to four adventurers of varying archetypes in their effort to fight back against the unholy attacking army. Each has their own character class, which dictates their abilities both in and out of battle. You start with a Priestess, a Huntress, and a Warrior. Bog-standard RPG tropes are in effect here: The Priestess is the weakest to damage and serves mainly to support the group with healing spells. The Warrior has the most armor and health to absorb damage for his allies, and the Huntress can deal damage from range. I’m sure you get the idea.
Your group will have to travel to each area that has been overtaken by one of the Seven Deadly Sins with the ultimate goal of defeating them and liberating the areas they’ve claimed. The catch is, that you’ll usually have to clear a path to each Deadly Sin before you can fight them. You typically do this by setting out to defeat a mini-boss that stands between you and whichever of the Deadly Sins you’re currently targeting. You’ll have to travel through a grid of tiles to locate your current mission’s objective. Random combat encounters will frequently crop up during this process.
Each class of adventurer you can recruit has abilities that can only be used outside of combat. The Huntress, for example, enables your group to flee from a combat encounter if you don’t like your chances of winning it. You can’t rely on abilities like this constantly, however, because out-of-combat skills have to be recharged by exploring certain amounts of grids between each use. Whichever enemies you would have fought in encounters you avoided with this ability remain wherever you found them, so you likely won’t be able to evade them forever.
Your soldiers require a secondary resource (Rage) to use most of their abilities. I think I see the logic behind the inclusion of this gameplay mechanic, but in practice, it doesn’t make sense to me the vast majority of the time. Maybe I’m just too thoroughly conditioned by my years spent with games like World of Warcraft, but the concept of a Priestess needing increasing amounts of rage to cast healing spells on her allies simply doesn’t “compute” for me. This is just the first of several aspects of Sin Slayers that I dislike.
Your characters occasionally talk while in combat, usually to taunt their foes. These dialogue lines are boring, repetitive, and hardly fit what I would expect each character class to say. I can’t see a Priestess ever saying, “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you!” Especially not when all three of her allies repeat that sentiment (verbatim) multiple times during a single combat encounter. I’m particularly disappointed by how little care and attention to detail was put into this part of Sin Slayers. That isn’t my only complaint about the writing in Sin Slayers, either.
Sin Slayers’ opening cutscene is voiced by a terrible narrator. Whoever was hired to provide the voice-over for this cutscene frequently slurred his speech as though he were intoxicated, and mispronounced several common words. I’m trying to avoid being too harsh about this, but it sounds like an overconfident non-native English speaker was hired as Sin Slayers’ narrator. This aspect of Sin Slayers is so obnoxious that I’m honestly not convinced that the narration voice-over wasn’t AI-generated. I’m glad this was the only voice acting I encountered playing Sin Slayers.
Sin Slayers had a lot of potential that it was held back from realizing for various reasons. Perhaps this (along with my other complaints) has been entirely addressed in the re-release version, Sin Slayers: Reign of the 8th. However, based on my experiences with the original release, I have no desire whatsoever to find out. I would charitably describe Sin Slayers as a game that was clearly inspired by Darkest Dungeon. However, it fails to decently emulate either of Red Hook Studios’ games in virtually every imaginable way. Give the re-release a chance if you want, but do so at your own risk.
A PC review key for Sin Slayers was provided by Goonswarm for this review.
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11 Sin Slayers
N/A
Pros
- Interesting story idea and atmosphere.
Cons
- Repetitive writing that rarely fits well in context.
- Awful narration.
- Confusing core gameplay mechanics.
