Take me away, Hawk Mama! 7DS / SDS First Impressions [Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross]

It’s been a little bit since the launch of Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross, 7DS as the app puts it, or if you want, SDS too. The player is put squarely at the very beginning of the series, so if you’re unfamiliar with the anime or manga, you can hop right in and experience the story through the game! The game was played on a Pocophone F1.

PRESENTATION

The art style is definitely very faithful to its source material, Everything is suitably colourful, true to the anime. It’s all in 3D models which are quite well done. The boasts of trailers using only in-game footage are well deserved! The game isn’t fully voiced though even with all this production quality, with voice work only in certain cutscenes, and of course, in battle.

The battles are quite nicely animated, with characters flying about and striking one another, with sound effects adding weight to the actions. The details are applied to the NPCs as well, so your regular residents will be showing up in whatever glory they had from the anime / manga.

The menus are pretty easy to navigate. Cards are distinct enough with art large enough to be easily distinguishable, and if they’re upgraded, they merge with a nice glow effect and will have its corresponding border change colour. Last but not least, the gacha screen shows off a cinematic with Meliodas fighting an enormous creature, before the explosion reveals your gacha results. Suitably epic!

CONTROLS

Controls are not complicated: swipe, tap and drag as required according to the context. You swipe around to shift the cards in your hand, or tap to use them. Hold on the cards to read their descriptions if you need more information before making your decision. You drag in the direction you want to move around in the 3D segments of the game in the towns and such. Tapping is probably what you’re going to do most, to navigate around the menus. It definitely suits and aids in one-handed play, especially so with it being in landscape mode.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay isn’t very hard either. It works like a card game, where your cards are drawn. From there, you tap on the cards you want to use, or you can swipe them around. Moving your cards will take up a “move”, shown as card slots on the screen. You’d typically want to move your cards if there’s a skill you can upgrade during battle.

Skills upgrade automatically, merging with copies of themselves when they’re adjacent. They’ll naturally have stronger effects at more stars, and can be upgraded to 3 stars at maximum. Multiple skills can merge and upgrade at the same time. Seeing them chain upgrades together can be quite exciting, as you prepare to unleash those attacks!

You can see what your opponents will do on their turn, with the actions all having their individual symbols. Learn to take out the ones doing the most attacks, or debuff them if you can! After some time, you’d be able to unleash an Ultimate Move. Take care though, as your enemies naturally have theirs too.

There’s a whole lot of other systems, like cooking food, gifting items to your party members, costumes… guilds unlock later, so you can play with like-minded people too. These slowly open up to you, so new players don’t get so quickly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to do.

Gacha is at a 4% rate for SSRs, which seems fairly standard. You can watch ads for a variety of extra bonuses daily, like one ad for a free solo pull.

VERDICT

Plenty of meat to get into, not counting Hawk and Hawk Mama. As always, game titles like these are meant to appeal to fans, and considering the production quality, I’d say they did that quite well for someone who used to be into the series!

It seems quite free to play friendly, with easy access to at least a single pull each day, so probability would say you’d get an SSR sooner than later, along with a pity system that grants you one for every 6 multi pulls you don’t obtain an SSR, a more generous net than a majority of gacha games out there.

Download

Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross

Developer: Netmarble

Release Date: 2019-06-04

Android, iOS

Are you ready to enjoy dynamic combat, breathtaking animations, and a riveting story true to the original? A brand-new turn-based RPG! A novel approach to combat! A strategic combat system utilizing skill synthesis.

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