Hades II (2025)

I'm warm, theres a storm raging outside, the cat has blessed me and hades 2 remains extremely fun.

Best kind of evening really

I think I'll move to dispatch next in the game, or do some more chaos head noah, I stalled on noah when I could not figure out how to do the content restore patch

Not ready for a full review yet but I wanted to throw some thoughts out there. Wow, people sure do hate that ending, don't they? I'd heard it was "controversial" but I looking around for discussion can hardly find anyone defending it, so it seems more like it's generally agreed upon to be bad, unfortunately. Granted, that's probably at least partially because there's so much hate towards it spewing out that defending it feels like too much trouble, so i imagine a lot of folks are staying quiet. Personally... I think its fine. It was obvious from the beginning with the games massively increased stakes and scope that it could not have a simple character wrap up like the first game, and keeping the game in a perpetual run state was going to require some kind of dumb hand waving almost for sure. I'll talk specifics now.

As soon as Melinoe told Zagreus to murder his helpless grandfather before he's done anything wrong, I knew he wasn't going to do that, lol. Most of those that hate the ending agree that Zagreus is acting fully in-character here from all he learned in the first game, and I love him for it. The commitment to always working things out with family fits perfectly with the series themes as a whole. I suppose the main problem people have with that is that it is Zagreus' theme, not Melinoe's. Mel... doesn't really have much of a theme going on, except for lost opportunities. Every relationship she has is always saying things like "I'd love if we got to do this someday" or "its too bad we never had time to x." So come to think of it, this ending does fit her themes a bit, as it allows her to make up for those lost opportunities by connecting with her grandfather who she spent her whole life planning on just killing. But its not a strong thematic connection, not narratively satisfying.

I still find it more satisfying than if the game had just gone "deatht to chronos," killed the old man, and then... party? Such a simple conclusion doesn't really justify the dozens upon dozens of runs it takes to get there and I feel like the characters would have nothing interesting to say once that was concluded. And Chronos' face turn does partially solve the big issue i had of the game just lacking a villain with any real depth or presence. Hades was a top tier character but Chronos is... just a bitter old wizard, and not even an especially intimidating one, considering the underworld route is intentionally much easier than the surface route. Making him deeply guilty and awkwardly doting due to a life's worth of instant character development does make him much more interesting to me, especially in how bizarre everyone feels about it in-universe.

Ultimately, all of the story issues in this game (especially the heavily padded character relationships) stem from the gameplay expansion, in making this game 3, maybe 3.5 times bigger than its predecessor. And those gameplay systems are, at least, huge improvements all around. Which is why I'm still easily rating this game 5 stars.

This wasn't a review, lol, I'll probably post one eventually. In the meantime, thank you Supergiant. You guys are still the best.

I'm having a lot of fun with Hades 2, but I gotta say that the autofire controls feel kinda poorly thought out? They work pretty much exactly the opposite of how I'd prefer, with basic attacks requiring multiple button presses to autofire, and omega moves requiring just one.

Easily rectified with Steam input shenanigans, but it's weird that the game's assistive options default to such a high-strain setup for my ancient, crumbling hands.

Haven't posted here for a while, but i had to renew it for this game. This is insane, peak game design. They took everything good from Hades and made it all better, more polished, more expansive and smoother. Definitely one of the best games i've ever played, this is what gaming is about!

Oh and the 3rd boss (Cerberus), my god, this has to be the pinnacle of game boss design...

I'm in a rough spot with the game right now. I've found the game to be way too easy or unfair. I add a couple more vows to increase the challenge and then the field becomes overloaded with visual information from my attacks and enemy attacks. So many enemies have huge AOE attacks that do insane damage. The floor is lava and enemies are firing homing missiles at you, it's not fun. The combat is loose, turning the game into a bullet hell that requires specific movements does not feel good. I have to get one or two hits in then run away, it makes fights drag on for so long, and just a couple of mistakes can ruin the run.

Hopefully this is a skill issue and I'll learn how to avoid the new attacks from bosses. I don't see how I can overcome the visual information issue though, that was already a problem in the first game, and they doubled down on it for the sequel.

After 20 hours, I have finally beaten the main bosses in the current version of Hades 2, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it and compare it to the first one

• The game finally feels like a roguelike. Aside from a few special cases, most boons in the first game felt like they were only upping your stats in general, making you kill enemies faster through extra hits or debuffs, and only the daedalus hammer modified how you actually played. With the addition of magick and omega attacks, boons have been forced to be more focused. Many upgrades in the game are still just generally good, but there's a great deal of upgrades that change how you approach the game now (especially magick regeneration and priming boons). It feels like you're finally allowed to do weird and fun builds for your character.

• The game has a plot now, which I really like. While the first game shines for its writing, it's entirely character driven, and not much changes as you go through the game. In Hades 2, the plot is evolving as you do more and more runs, with Chronos getting closer to victory as you spend more time trying to beat him, raising the stakes and making the player feel more invested in the overall story. It's a great change, and I can't wait to see how it ends.

• The inventory system feels very overwhelming. It has way too many items and it can get confusing at times. It's designed like this so that you're essentially unlocking all upgrades by accident, you just buy what you can with the items you got in your last run, and while it's not too bad right now, it has the potential of turning into a truly annoying mechanic if the developers don't streamline the items needed for all upgrades by the time the game is out.

• The design for bosses is not as good. A few of them rely very heavily on spamming projectiles, so they incentivize camping and staying far away until they finally stop attacking for 2 seconds and you can land a few hits, essentially making their fights nothing more than a few minutes of poking. I think the fight with Chronos is really well done, as he does zone you out but you can dodge his attacks and get back to hitting him immediately, but fights like Hecate or Polyphemus just rely too much on AoE and projectiles and it's so boring.

• Not a fan of the changes they made to the heat mechanic (now called fear). The overhaul to the items and implementation of an inventory means they had to change the rewards for playing with a high fear, but it just makes these runs feel less impactful than in the first one, and the one reward you get is almost useless at this point. Really hoping they add more to them for the full release.

I don't have much else to say. Everything else is either the same as it was in Hades 1, or is clearly unfinished and will get fixed by the time 1.0 comes out. I don't think I'll be trying out any of the updates, so I'll check back in one year to see how the game turns out. In the meantime, yeah I think it's better than the first one.

2 thoughts now that I have beaten the final boss twice.

• My biggest issue would be that I do not like the meta progression of the game. Particularly, how many types of resources there are. If the reason for this was from a narrative standpoint, I'd get it, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Incantations are the house orders from Hades I. They unlock cosmetics, rooms and things to make runs generally easier. Hades I had 2 resources needed for house orders that are important for runs: gemstones and diamonds. You can get gemstones like you can psyche and ashes and diamonds are collected by killing the hydra. Very simple. Hades II has so many types of resources that bloat the games progression system. And the way I see it, they were purposefully made to bloat the game. Some resources are grindy to collect. My favorite example being gardening plants, alchemy, and ordering resources. Let's use gardening as the main one, you collect seeds during runs and once you collect seeds, you gotta plant them back in the hub, play through a certain amount of locations in order for the plants to grow and then you get the progression item that you need. All of this to get certain resources. All of these resources are needed for meta progression. Over 41 items needed for incantations compared to 2 in Hades I. I like that there is more decision making with resources that cross over to other progression systems, but there is so much to gather.
• I played on controller and it took me 5 hours to realize you can upgrade your grasp. This menu doesn't communicate well with the player that they can keep pressing right to upgrade the grasps. Upgrade your grasp, it is very important and it sucks that this isn't even tutorialized.

Core gameplay loop is still pretty fun most of the time. I like some boons that impact status effects like sprinting into a blitzed enemy to immediately make the effect happen or having someone have 300 scorch in order to damage them some more and you just keep scorching and scorching to keep that effect going.

This may come off as heresy and I know that it is in early access so maybe I didn't experience everything, but it took me ten seconds of a track from Bastion and 13 hours of Hades II to make me have the opinion that a lot of the current music for Hades II is boring.

The track in question: