7 Sexy Sins is an adult-oriented shmup in where we play as an angel on a quest from God himself to collect more lewd pics of demon girls after having shown him his collection one day. Our boi, Raphael, gladly obliges and heads straight to hell with the intention of lewding a demon from each circle of hell. It is certainly not the type of story you’d hear from the Christian bible, but whatever religion this is, I want in. In any case, other than a short back and forth with each of the seven girls on offer, the plot is minimal, our holy goal unwaivable.
Starting off, you have access to three of the girls/stages. To unlock more requires you to accomplish specific tasks ranging from not getting hit in three of the levels or destroying every enemy in a certain stage. It is not a difficult game, yet neither is it one you will easily breeze through. It includes two difficulty modes, Easy & Normal. The former is perfect for newcomers to the genre and has a lot of effort put into it to retain some challenge. Playing on Easy, you will receive a ton more lives, yet it is still designed in such a way as to get you good at the game. Enemy attacks are slower, boss moves more forgiving, and the score is also lowered to reflect that. It is certainly toned down a notch, though not enough to lose its edge and make it a cakewalk.
There isn’t anything you can’t unlock while playing on Easy, and the fact there are no online leader-boards doesn’t help much to get one to care about high-scores. You don’t have to move up on difficulty if you don’t want to. Normal is where you want to be at if you have any experience in the genre and are here for more than hentai, however. You still receive a generous three lives to clear a stage and it ups the challenge in boss fights, which are the only areas of the game you are likely to die on. The basic enemies don’t pose much of a threat on any difficulty unless you windup getting distracted by the ever-increasing amounts of nudity in the background.
7 Sexy Sin’s gameplay is simple. You have a button to shoot, a button to slow down, and a projectile clearing skill for emergency situations. Using that special ability will cast a holy ray of light across the screen to dissolve any attack that may harm you, but at the same time, you can’t shoot your foes either. The animation for it lasts quite a bit, so you do not want to be using it for no reason. You can carry up to five uses of this ability by collecting special icons that seem to randomly appear. I’ve never found a reason to slow down as you already move at a rather leisurely pace. In fact, a button to speed your character up would have been more useful. You’ll mostly just be holding the attack button and moving throughout due to the other two buttons being near useless or very situational.
That simplicity would be all well and good, but the game’s main selling point actually detracts from the gameplay. Your main goal is to shoot off all of the girl’s clothing. This aspect is not handled as well as in other titles, unfortunately. You see, it falls into a critically flawed combination. It takes a ton of damage to rip apart clothing and there is a ton of it. According to the store page, there are 271 pieces of it in total and there are only 7 stages. Their hitboxes are also massive, causing any enemy behind it to be effectively immortal until it is destroyed. That very quickly gets annoying as it feels like you are shooting at nothing a majority of the time. The screen is too zoomed in and the clothing hitbox is too big to be able to shoot around it. That brings the flow of the title to a crawl as you simply sit there waiting until you can shoot freely before the next clothing item pops up.
Not helping matters is how long the stages take just to accommodate all the clothing. That only helps to bring attention to the issue and makes the limited enemy variety all the more obvious. When you finally manage to reach the boss fights is where this game really shines. You’ll fight a chibi version of the demon you were undressing in the background and they all have some really interesting attacks. I enjoyed fighting all seven of them and can immediately remember what separated them from the others. It is here where you truly have to pay attention and will get some use out of your projectile clearing ability. It never reached bullet hell territory, yet their move-sets are so varied you can easily get caught off guard your first time.
When facing a boss, you are also tasked with removing the last remnants of her clothing. You don’t really have to worry about specifically targeting them. She has so much health that you are likely to destroy her clothing in the crossfire anyways. Dying will reset you to the default amount of firepower. If you are lucky, a blue icon that increases it up again will show up soon. It is not run ending, though regardless of the difficulty, you should do all that you can to avoid dying when you have a decent amount of firepower. Every time you power up, there will be another stream added to your basic attack. It will help you continuously hit the boss or to deal some serious damage if you are daring enough to get in close.
Boss fights do have a similar problem to clothing in that they just seem to drag on. A life-bar for them or some indicator of how well you are doing would help a ton with that sensation. Or better yet, have the last bits of clothing rip off as you damage her more, instead of just shooting it off yourself like the rest of the clothes. I’ve been trying to avoid the elephant in the room, that being Deep Space Waifu. This title is obviously inspired by that, yet doesn’t understand what made the remove clothing feature fun. It needs some flow to it. A shmup lives or dies with its ability to keep you perpetually concentrated. Simply tossing in a ton more clothing and upping the damage it takes to remove them only serves to make you zone out. 7 Sexy Sins is a better shooter than Deep Space Waifu in my opinion, but you only get glimpses of it on the boss fights.
Its artwork is pretty solid. Each girl has a distinct look and it’s interesting to see how they connect thematically to their circles of hell. Right out of the box, the game will be censored. Funnily enough, I found the ways in which they censor genitals to sometimes be significantly more lewd than merely showing some demon vag. They don’t simply throw a blur effect or lazy mosaic in there, they make some custom artwork to fit the demon in question. The demon of greed, for instance, has a thousand dollar bill covering her moist crotch, while gluttony has some whipped cream. Those little details had the side effect of making me want to play the game twice just to see all the artwork. To uncensor this title, you just need to create a text file named nude_patch inside of the 7SexySins_data folder. Just make sure it is a text file and you are golden.
A pleasant surprise was just how good the soundtrack was. The techno, drum-heavy Dance music was right up my alley. I’ve been a little harsh with this title throughout this review, but I undeniably had satisfying moments with 7 Sexy Sins alongside the bouts of boredom. It has the potential to be so much more, though as it stands, it is still a fun little romp for shooter fans and hentai connoisseurs alike. At the price of two bucks, you really can’t go wrong here. You have seven pieces of solid artwork, seven levels, and seven 2D waifus to gawk at. It is not the best adult-oriented shooter out there, but it would still make a fine addition to your collection.
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