On the meme side of things he’s certainly Lust 
but in the game, to me, he feels more like Greed. For example, he doesn’t want to pay 47 when his portrait is being painted. He also mentions his riches sometimes if I remember correctly?
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I’d agree, but I see him as being along the same line of greed as the majority of the targets. He’s just as lusting, not only in a sexual way but for things he likes in general, that I makes up most of his personality I think. But I did put him in the category.
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Good list.
I would also include Jordan Cross under Pride.
Missing:
Victor Novakov - pride
Dalia - greed
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I guess Jordan could go in Pride, although Novikov and Dalia, while greedy, I think they do what they do more because they like what they do than for the rewards themselves. That’s how I see them, mainly.
I would say Novikov is definitely pride, in thinking no one can touch him. He sends Grey to tie up any loose ends at the FSB to remain untouchable while believing the information provided to Grey will keep him an ally, without realizing Grey is playing a larger game and will betray him.
Dawood hit most of 'em, but I was thinking ‘Envy’ could be included given the “talk” he gives Gregory.
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"Sweet Dreams" 7 Deadly Sins Fan-Trailer - YouTube shoutout to scoobywizard for this masterpiece of the song
So I finally got the Seven Deadly Sins Collection with 65% off in a recent sale. I remained unenthusiastic about this purchase, but ownership of the DLC is compulsory to achieve 100% completion in HITMAN 3. For that reason, I spent another £8.74 for content I did not really want. More fool me, I guess.
Obviously this existing bias must be taken into account when considering my review of the DLC. With that said, here are my thoughts on the Seven Deadly Sins.
Gameplay
I began with an understanding that I shouldn’t expect too much. Each pack contains an Escalation. I’ve never been a huge fan of Escalations. Some of my favourites are those which present a puzzle, give you a degree of freedom in solving that puzzle, and then add new objectives or restrictions to make you adapt your existing strategy in some way (I enjoyed quite a few of these back in 2016).
Escalations in 7DS are more experimental in terms of format. Each of the three stages is different. No longer can you build an existing strategy from one stage to the next. Frequent use of restrictions severely limits freedom of approach. It no longer feels quite so much like solving a puzzle in the classic Hitman way.
My least favourite gameplay experience was probably with the first pack, Greed. This mainly came down to the instant fail “never be spotted” condition which I found utterly tedious. The worst instance of this was when I was 0.3 seconds away from pulling the trigger on the final target of Level 3. He turned his head ever so slightly and instantly spotted me. I got the fail screen at the exact moment I clicked fire to kill him.
I hoped things might improve gameplay-wise as I went along. I had heard people talk slightly better of certain later packs. A welcome development was the abandonment of the 3-level format in Lust. However, the random safe locations mitigated this by making each replay feel like just another stage anyway.
I had heard good things about Wrath. I did appreciate it doing something different. But three stages each with three waves felt overly long. It was annoying to make a slight mistake at the end of stage 3, wave 3 and needing to start from the beginning of wave 1 all over again. Ultimately this style of gameplay is not suited to Hitman - it’s actively discouraged with 47’s low damage threshold.
Gluttony may have been the one I enjoyed the most. I think this was due to the relative level of freedom it provided, allowing you to use existing map knowledge and accumulate strategies from one stage to the next. Nonetheless, the focus on the ICA facility felt like a drag in the later levels. I suppose this is unavoidable when Chongqing as a location is so dominated by its subterranean fortress.
Suits & Items
The other component of my 7DS purchase is the ‘unique suit and sin-themed item’ from each pack. I cannot see myself ever using these suits again, perhaps with the exception of those from Lust or Wrath on rare occasions. Luckily they are hidden in their own separate tab, so suit selection is not cluttered with them. The same does not apply for the items, which are mixed in with everything else. One or two of these items might provide a degree of utility in future but overall I see them being just as forgettable as the suits.
Final thoughts
As I acknowledged at the outset, my experience with 7DS was no doubt influenced by my reluctance to buy the collection in the first place. This spilled over into gameplay because it felt like busywork on the road to 100% completion. Of course I must take some degree of blame for arriving with this mindset. I didn’t want to replay the Escalations, but each one came with challenges which required either several replays to succeed or just looking up guides on how to achieve these conditions all at once. This felt like a drag.
Additionally, I couldn’t help but escape the feeling that these challenges were added in order to pad out the number for each HITMAN 3 location. With HITMAN 2, in particular, it sometimes felt like there were too many challenges, so I would not have minded a slimmed-down checklist for each location in HITMAN 3. Instead, these compulsory 7DS challenges for 100% completion ended up being the worst of both worlds.
My most fundamental criticism relates to something I already touched upon when discussing the suits & items. Ultimately the Seven Deadly Sins does not fit within the World of Assassination. I understand that these are dream sequences which don’t exist in the ‘real world’ of the game. Yet I cannot escape the feeling that the atmosphere of the locations is undermined just by playing them.
One of my favourite elements of Hitman is the sense of exploring the familiar, and transgressing within those environments. Using our natural understanding of social spaces to infiltrate within plain sight. What I love so much about the WoA Trilogy is the authenticity of its locations. But when playing 7DS, it suddenly feels obvious that the NPCs are just puppets, the locations merely set dressing. It sucks the life out.
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The 7 Deadly Sins content makes a lot more sense if you look at it as a test platform for Freelancer. Most of the new mechanics found in Freelancer are introduced one way or another in the 7 Deadly Sins levels.
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Taking that perspective, the fact that Freelancer is free makes the horrible pricing for some “okay at best; utter nadir of the entire trilogy at worst” content (all IMO) a lot more bearable… it didn’t feel that way at the time though.
Luckily Ambrose Island came along for free too and IOI come out of the whole thing smelling of roses rather than just clawing back ground to net-zero gain/loss.
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The existence of Freelancer makes no difference to my 7DS review. I noted my grievances regarding price at the start, but for the remainder I tried to assess the content at face value. How did I enjoy the gameplay experience? Will I re-use the items? What stylistic impact does 7DS have for the game overall?
I avoided any judgements along the lines of ‘value for money’ and did not make comparisons to earlier DLC in the Trilogy. When reviewing 7DS on its own merit, the existence of separate free content is irrelevant.
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I liked most of 7DS, am all about the new items and suits, played the escalations as soon as they came out, and never went back.
I just view 7DS as fun new stuff to do while we waited for other stuff, and since it can be considered to canonically take place in 47’s mind, one can even consider it a part of the story, so to speak. My guess is, the decision to make Ambrose or Freelancer or both free content was because of the negative responses to both 7DS’s price and content. Although that’s just conjecture.
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I appreciate that IOI would take a chance and mix things up a bit, and try things out, such as this DLC or Ghost Mode.
It is through the process of changing things up a bit that they were confident in putting together Freelancer, which had elements of different things IOI tried out within the Hitman Trilogy.
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It’s really hard to agree with any of this when you’re constantly undermining the good points by only really elaborating on why 7DS doesn’t work and seemingly missing out what does.
And a lot of it does work. But that isn’t fashionable to say here.
I dunno, just reads like confirmation bias.
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“7DS isn’t any good because it was hard and IOI made me pay all this money for it” seems to be the essence of the argument by those who didn’t like it.
despite it being piss easy?
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Hey, it’s not my complaint. I loved 7DS. Greed and especially Wrath seem to have folks who don’t want to bother completing them.
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You make a fair criticism. I wouldn’t claim to have written a thorough or balanced review. I acknowledged my biases and then gave my thoughts, which reflected my negative experience when playing.
You can chalk this up entirely to confirmation bias if you like. I enjoyed very little of the gameplay and I don’t think 7DS works tonally within the World of Assassination. I think it actively harms the atmosphere.
Some of it may have ‘worked’ for you. It didn’t for me, unfortunately.
Personally, I think they’re fairly easy, even the related challenges are pretty doable (the Wrath ones I did in the first run: once enemies are busy to engage you in combat, they’ll not go any further).
More than difficult, I’d say they are tedious and not fun at all, both Greed and Wrath.
7ds, for me, was nothing more than a poor excuse for the related seasonal events dropped in the 2021 year, rather than a dlc. I didn’t enjoy those that much, though I think Gluttony and Envy were both decent. But I won’t argue with those players that somehow enjoyed it.
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