Recent reviews by [HTT] im wooser

this rules I love shooting gun

sucks

To start, I like this game. I think it's fun to play, it controls well, there is polish where needed and thought to the balance of what I might want to do at at any moment, enough to make each decision meaningful and thus fun to work out what I need either right now or possibly later, in both the combat and the build-making boon decisions or gold purchases. I love the heat/fear system of adjustable difficulty depending on what you find either fun or annoying. Sometimes it just feels good to be really strong and winning, other times there's a great tension of near loss that you can claw your way out of by really concentrating and being smart about your every move and decision.

I will now describe how I felt when I first bought and played it. The first few hours are abysmal. The game doesn't want you to play it yet, just collect meta-currency ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, it's a hard sell. Only play this if you are willing to put up with a slow and not very fun start. There are SIXTY meta-currencies to collect and use on all sorts of ♥♥♥♥ and it feels like a mobile game at first cause of it. There's a great ARPG deep inside but you gotta suffer through some real crap which coincidentally was all in the refund window. Like they were begging you to return it. There may even be a chance I did that, considering my play time! Or I'm just very astute.

After playing it a LOT I can appreciate what it's doing, though I can't call this a strictly better game than hades 1. The weapons are strange, some you can appreciate as actual weapons with differing playstyles but a lot will focus on being a specific boon curse applicator and little more. The axes and some of the "Xinth, The Black Coat" aspects are generally more like you'd expect using a weapon to feel like, same for the knives but they're weak and simply too short range for most bosses until you unlock morrigan. Yeah they're not unusable but they don't feel great. Same for the staff until you have a good amount of game knowledge, there's a movement delay on the special that just feels HORRIBLE when you are first starting the game, once you're experienced it doesn't matter. The differing ranges on the staff's attack at first feels bad too, you get used to it but starting out? It feels bad! It's not a good choice for a starting weapon. I didn't like the starting sword in hades 1 due to how much it caused you to slide around the arenas but the staff as the starting weapon in this is really cumbersome in comparison.

I like the combat. It's hectic but controlled chaos, requires more thought than hades 1 without the many dash charges, instead needs good timing on your single dash alongside smart use of all of your moveset. You can with high "fear" tackle what seems insurmountable with careful decisions made in a quick, flow-state manner. It takes a while to get used to omega moves and mana management, but ultimately it's a good system for the game to have. If the weapon works particularly well with a certain mana-recovery boon, it will work well with the other boons available from that god. It allows strong functions like blocking with "Xinth, The Black Coat" without making blocking damage too easy as hades 1 proved with shield builds being the best for high heat. However as mentioned the early game is miserable so it can take a while for any of this to become apparent, the arcana to make omegas charge faster and the slowdown on aiming them feels kinda mandatory for certain weapons to feel good to use. Mana can be dealt with by a single boon, but it can take a while to learn which weapons/aspects work best with particular mana-recovery boons and being stuck with one that doesn't fit feels pretty bad.

The first zone of the underworld, in tradition of the first part of this game being pretty bad, is generally not good. It's hard to see, enemies are white on blue-green-grey with a busy background compared to the orange on flat blues of tartarus in the first zone of hades 1 and the white flashes of enemies about to perform their attack doesn't mean much when the enemies themselves are white. It's not a good starting zone. Lots of projectile chip damage instead of slower heavy hits, a lack of contrast, a busy background, it just makes for a bad starting zone even if you're familiar with hades 1. Oceanus is pretty straight forward, mourning fields is annoying until you unlock the tree thing, but I think erebus specifically should have been easier to get accustomed to for new players like tartarus was considering the game practically forces you to go no further for your first 10 runs.

Now let me talk about the surface. The surface compared to the underworld is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome and it's surprising the much better part of the game is hidden behind many hours of the part I find to be a lot less interesting to play. More interesting and different layouts for each region, less messy and more challenging bosses (other than final boss), much cleaner to read backgrounds, nicer music (tartarus has nice music but generally surface is better), and it just feels like you're overcoming things better than the underground does due to the enemies needing more attention to their movesets. You can invalidate enemies moves with the right boons, but to really get a handle on what's actually happening on screen it helps to learn how enemies act when they aren't frozen or whatever.

Leads me to the elephant in the room, visual clarity, it's a bit of an issue. It wasn't perfect in 1 with things like zeus or some casts, this game isn't much better with most effects. But this game loves moving your camera around in all kinds of ways that can be really disorientating. There's a blur when moving, at least on my monitor, and it doesn't help for dodging the many, many projectiles on screen. Mainly the lack of attention to color contrast the first game prioritised stands out. Enemy projectiles in hades 1 were usually a bright magenta, here they might be that... or red, or dark red, or green? With no real regards to what the color of the background may be. It's messy. You get used to it, but it's another thing that makes getting into the game harder that hades 1 avoided.

Guess I should mention the plot. It's not stellar. Mel isn't a bad character but zag had better charisma and there was a much more jovial tone throughout hades 1, in this it's a lot of very repetitive "chronos and typhon are real bad mate" lines from every single character. You can come to like characters sure, but it's a very slow burn, no instant chemistry. The ending is pretty badly done and it sours the dialogue of runs after, characters are simply confused by it as much as the player is, not really something the player is going to be interested in hearing. Yeah, it's sudden and strange and confusing, we get it. Wanna explain any of it? Eh, nah.

So should you buy hades 2? Well if you liked hades 1, give it a try, but no guarantees. You don't wanna be starting with this game, it clearly wants you at least plot wise to have finished hades 1. Or at least to have read the wiki synposis or something. Either way unless you know who zagreus is as a character you're gonna get blindsided plotwise and possibly mechanically too once you unlock a certain post-ending thing.

Still, I like the combat a lot, so I'm giving it the thumbs up. With the big, big caveat that the beginning of this game is awful.

Very good but get ready for some long load times even on an M2. Bots in the campaign have a tendency to stand still shooting at nothing too, which is odd cause in operations they work fine. Still I like killing tons of dudes with meltaguns and a chainsword.

I love my dead wife Makise Kurisu.

I love my girlfriend Makise Kurisu.

I love Makise Kurisu I want to get married to her.

Had a lot of fun until the deflect mechanic was introduced, after that much less fun. Just didn't click with me at all and led to redoing fights not because I died but because I didn't kill the enemy before the time limit. Made the game boring, I could set the game to easy and just spam deflect to finish the game but that would also be boring. The trap gauntlet in the laboratory also drained all my will to keep playing even if I got past it that sucked balls. Saw the frogs wrath fight, thought it was cool, saw some of the other fights and they were okay but I think I'm good. Great music.

Ultimately very good. It's resident evil with, for some reason, the veneer of the gold saucer from ff7 as a survival horror game. The PSX filter actually looks pretty good and the models and environments work for it, consistent tone and appropriate graphics. Aiming and shooting is no trouble, the enemies move as you would expect. There are traps and if you aren't paying enough attention they can kill you faster than the enemies, as those have a clear audio warning. The puzzles are either plainly explained within the room you encounter them, or cannot be completed until you've obtained a necessary item, with one poor exception (the mush room).

Resource management however, on the default difficulty, is kind of disappointing. The game uses a hl2/re4 style 'whatever you lack' system of generating item pickups in boxes, glass jars or trash cans, but because you regularly revisit areas you are incentivised to ignore them until you might actually need them, as they do not respawn and offer nothing if you are considered to have enough resources. Unless you are being really silly with your ammo, or rushing through areas to not find all the static resources, you'll rarely need all these things when you first encounter them. The only actually limited resource is magnum ammo which is appropriate, but that leads to you only using it on bosses and then not ever being short on ammo due to a boss, which is a great moment of tension in survival horror games. I have not yet played on hard mode, but the simple fact that you should be trying to cheat the system by getting your ammo low before opening a box, or using medkits/grenades when you don't really need to so that they spawn more instead of something less useful leads to a conflict between game knowledge and executing the right tactics. Especially because static spawns are unaffected, so if you know there's a bunch of handgun ammo ahead you should spam it empty, hit the vending machine then pick them all up to stay on or near max ammo. The dynamic system works well for linear games, but not so much when you can and will revisit an area multiple times. I think static spawns alongside the pity system of giving out handgun ammo at vending machines/the car when you're nearly out would have worked a lot better.

That said the plot and atmosphere bring the game up a lot, it isn't overbearing but has a satisfying conclusion with a decent mystery throughout and a simple but effective execution of its characters. The music, environments and sort-of juxtaposition of the ruined park and its strange monsters makes for a good experience of exploration and horror without relying on jump-scares. A great moment was seeing something very large and strange on a security monitor and realising, after beating the game, that it was never encountered. There was a lot of care put into the game that is appreciated, even if it isn't flawless. I encountered a couple of bugs in my playthrough that I'm sure will be fixed in time and only one was game-breaking (there are issues with collision detection on the player when hit by some enemy attacks, rare but possible).

Again overall very good game, definitely worth the price. Not the longest single playthrough but clearly intended for multiple runs, unlocking things via ending rank and having a hard mode. Special mention for being the only "PSX throwback" game I've played that actually gets the look right and not throwing in a bunch of offputting modern effects.

this game rocks. particularly like that the meta upgrades don't matter too much, it's entirely possible to win on your first few runs. only problem is visibility, it can sometimes be hard to tell exactly what is able to damage you and what is simply decoration like when enemies explode into random little bits or projectiles have fancy effects that aren't actually the damaging part. hopefully there will be opacity sliders for those too.


EDIT: Having played enough to finish all the 'story' quests currently available and get to mastery ~20, I can point out a couple major things. First is that you always want to be killing all enemies on screen as soon as possible, which isn't a bad thing but does limit the player to a specific goal, which is simply to ignore enemy mechanics by ending fights ASAP. Extreme visual noise from your own and enemy attacks only exacerbates this, especially with certain enchanted enemies.

The effect this has on game balance is that while you can scale your damage to absurd degrees your weapons range cannot be changed, so you always want something that can be hitting enemies from the other end of the room to give you more space to dodge attacks with. Close range weapons do not offer enough to be worth using and selecting traits that bank effects to increase damage while not attacking do not solve this, as you will spend more time dodging and looking for an opportunity to attack while a longer ranged weapon with enough damage increases could have ended the fight long before. Unless close ranged weapons are changed to deal massive amounts more damage to give the player more room to instead build around protections I cannot see them having a common use case granting a similar level of game difficulty to using long ranged weapons.

Additionally if there is ever a way to adjust difficulty of some kind I think it'd be best implemented as a game speed slider during combat, as it can get incredibly hectic and hard to read. This would increase the total playtime required for runs but I think that would be acceptable to those who feel the game is too difficult.