Hades 2 Early Access Review
It is shocking to see that Hades 2 is only in early access, and that Supergiant Games plans to let it spend at least the rest of 2024 there before it’s ready to call it version 1.0. Shocking, because it already has just about everything I want from a sequel to one of the best roguelite action games of all time. Hades 2 manages to keep everything that made the original such a masterclass of design, but it does so in a way that changes up how each of the pieces fits together and gives it its own unique identity rather than feeling like a glorified expansion. The result is a familiar, but fresh follow up that challenged, surprised, and delighted me with every triumph and failure in equal measure. There are a few things missing, with an actual ending to its story being the most substantial among them, but once it’s complete it’s hard to imagine Hades 2 not living up to the mythological legacy of the first.
I’m not going to spend too long explaining why what’s carried over from the original Hades works so well. IGN gave it our Game of the Year Award in 2020 for a reason, and if you haven’t played the Greek gods’ gift to gamers yet and think you might enjoy some of the smoothest, most stylish isometric action ever made, tied up with a story that just keeps getting deeper with each run, you absolutely should before jumping into round two. I’ll wait.
Alright, now that you’re up to speed you can appreciate that what Hades 2 does exceptionally well is swap out all of the old weapons, boons, boosts, and other pieces from the previous game with brand new ones that do a lot of the same things, but in fresh and exciting ways. To begin with, this time around you play as Melinoe, Zagreus’s sister and the daughter of Hades, who very much shares her brother’s smooth vocal tones and cool demeanor. She’s a bit more proper and less playful than Zag, with a personality befitting of the Princess of the Underworld, but she’s no less likable and equally well written.
She controls largely the same as Zag, but with a couple of key changes that lead to some dramatically different playstyles. For instance, there’s a sprint that can be used endlessly to escape danger, or – if you have the proper boons enhancing it – to charge head-first into it. The increased sustained speed comes at a price, though: She’s far less dash-happy than Zag. She still has a dash that allows her to slip through enemy attacks or cross gaps, but in my 40 or so hours of play so far, I’ve yet to see an upgrade that allows her to increase the number of dashes she has. This is a big change because Hades is a game where I dash a lot. Heck, I dash more than I run for the most part. But Supergiant has done a great job of designing its enemies and bosses around that gameplay change, and as a result I never found myself missing multi-dashes too much. Eventually I fell in love with the sprint and the boons that enhanced it, which might increase its speed to make it better at evasion, or turn it into an aquatic bulldozing attack, or turn you into a moving crosshair for Zeus’s lightning, electrocuting any enemy you run close to.
Since Melinoe is a witch, she’s also got a completely revamped magic system that adds several wrinkles to combat that require you to think a bit more about resource management. By holding down the button for her three offensive techniques – attack, special, and cast – she can use an Omega variation of those abilities that use mana. So for example, the starting magic staff has a regular attack that just does a standard three-hit combo, but if you hold down the attack button to charge up an Omega attack, when you release it you’ll shoot out a powerful magic blast that extends a great distance both in front of and behind you. Omega attacks are an incredible addition that not only improve the moment-to-moment action and decision making of Hades’ combat, but also add some new options when it comes to build crafting.
And this is where Hades 2 really shines even brighter than Hades did before: There are just so many options you can build your character toward during any given run that dramatically change how you approach it. And the beauty is that, while there are certainly builds that are stronger than others, I always felt like I had a shot of getting further than I did before, regardless of what kind of build I tried. So many roguelites suffer from this feeling of having “doomed runs” where you just don’t get the kind of scaling or key upgrades that you need to survive in later levels, but that was never my experience with Hades 2. My deaths largely came down to encountering new enemies that I wasn’t yet familiar with, getting too greedy with my attacks, or just simply making too many mistakes, as opposed to feeling like I just fell behind the power curve. (Though I will say that the final boss in the Underworld currently seems a little overpowered compared to everything leading up to him.)
One run had me getting a bunch of powerups for my cast, which is now a circular sigil you can place on the floor that will temporarily snare enemies that run into it. One particular boon, though, made it so that after remaining on the floor for a few seconds, the sigil would do rapid-fire explosions and deal huge damage to anything snared inside. So I would dart in, drop my Omega cCast down, then charge up my Omega special – which, on this run caused multiple projectiles to circle me – and just watch with glee as the enemies melted in my circle of death.
That was completely different from my run with the Giant Axe weapon, which had me enhancing my sprint speed so I could put a ton of distance between me and my enemies before charging up an extremely powerful Omega special that would virtually wipe out all enemies in a line in front of me – if I got a chance to let the move rock, which takes a little time. Like any good roguelite, every run of Hades 2 has felt different, taught me a lesson I could use in the future, and was fun in its own unique way.
Everything that we’ve covered so far has largely been stuff that was already good in the first game that’s tuned to be just a bit better in this sequel, but the one area where Hades 2 absolutely blows the original out of the water is in the depth and variety of its regions. No two are anything alike, with the third Underworld area in particular being a series of more open fields that requires you to clear multiple encounters and obtain multiple rewards before being able to move on to the next.
You may have noticed that I keep specifying the Underworld regions, which is because there’s a whole separate set of levels, enemies, and bosses waiting for you above ground as well. I don’t want to spoil too much of what awaits you if you take the stairs going up, but suffice it to say that these levels are where Supergiant really experiments with the level design, to great effect.
I Went Down to the Crossroads
In between runs you’ll find yourself back at the Crossroads, a hidden sanctuary in between the surface and the Underworld. Pretty much everything that you could do in the House of Hades in the first game can be done in the Crossroads as well: You’ll go around gifting nectars to NPCs in order to increase your bonds with them and gain their keepsakes, you can cross off long-term milestone goals from the prophecy list for a variety of rewards, and you can engage in seemingly endless dialogues with the many legendary Greek figures who inhabit it, from the heroic Odysseus, to the rebellious Nemesis, to the adorably sassy shade, Dora.
That said, the way in which you progress Mel’s strength is very different from how it worked with Zag. This time around there’s a grid of Arcana cards that each require a certain amount of resources to unlock; once you do you can equip its bonuses (assuming you have enough Grasp, which limits how many cards can be equipped simultaneously), and will also reveal the bonuses of the two adjacent cards on the grid. It’s a great system that balances powerful bonuses with higher Grasp costs, and also makes the decision of what you want to prioritize finding once you’re in a run feel even more important. Do you go for more of the resources needed to actually unlock more Arcana cards, or more Psyche, which is used to increase your maximum Grasp and allows you to equip more cards?
In addition to these resources, there’s a lot more to find in the levels of Hades 2. There are different types of flowers, metals, and monster parts, with all of them being used to concoct incantations that unlock some sort of new gameplay element or mechanic. This is very similar to the House Contractor from the first game, but it works even better in Hades 2 where you can make more decisions about what kind of resource-collecting tool you want to take with you into a run and prioritize one concoction over another.
One of my favorite incantations actually adds a hot spring to the Crossroads, and that allows you to invite NPCs on a bit more of an intimate hot springs date. As you might imagine, this leads to some fun conversations that dive a little bit deeper into these characters than your standard chats when they’ve got an exclamation point over their heads.
While I can’t say there’s been a dramatic improvement in how Hades 2 looks relative to the first game, that’s an extremely high bar and I’m not sure I’d want it to change that much anyway. The art style remains as stellar as ever, with a soundtrack to match. My favorite boss fight is currently Scylla and the Sirens, which has a banger theme song that dynamically adjusts whenever you take out one of the performers to remove their part from the song. That’s a really cool touch on an already awesome boss fight, and it’s things like that that make me especially excited to see what Supergiant has held back to really wow us when Hades 2 launches out of early access.
It’s also worth mentioning that after beating the final boss of the underworld, you unlock Hades 2’s equivalent of the Pact of Punishment, called the Testament of Night. This allows you to add specific difficulty modifiers to your next run that might increase the damage of enemies, or make healing items less effective, or make all enemies faster. It’s basically a customizable New Game+ mode with rewards and incentives that was brilliant in Hades 1, and I’m stoked to see it already in Hades 2.
So, what’s unfinished about Hades 2 to make it release in Early Access? Well, there are still some placeholder portraits for characters like Charon, Narcissus, and a few others I won’t spoil; some boon icons are missing unique art and just have letters to differentiate them; there are a few visual effects that I imagine will be cleaned up when the game reaches version 1.0, and most importantly, even though you can unlock it’s version of New Game+, the story doesn’t currently have an ending. The development road map on the title screen also makes it clear that they’re still working on a whole new region to explore, new cosmetic features for the Crossroads, and another new weapon to be released in the next major update.
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