Just like the first game, Hades 2 launched first in early access, allowing developer Supergiant Games to delicately tweak and balance gameplay, as well as add new content before its full launch. And, like the first game, that time was not wasted.
Hades 2 exits early access as a finely-honed and deeply engaging roguelite that builds upon the strong foundations established by the first game. It’s larger in every way, with more characters and conversations to enjoy, an entirely new roster of weapons to learn, and deeper customization options to its expanded combat system, yet none of these upgrades compromise Hades’ legacy. Rather, Hades 2 improves upon its predecessor in every way, making it a masterfully crafted sequel that is essential to play.
Instead of playing as Zagreus again, you play as his sister, Melinoe, who was born after the events of the first game. Your journey with the witchling begins shortly after the titan Chronos usurps the throne and takes over Hades’s domain, banishing Hades, Persephone, Zagreus, and the other Chthonic gods as he does so. Melinoe, saved from the unknown fate of her family, has been raised to realize one simple goal: Death to Chronos. That goal is realized over many, many treks through Hades and beyond, with each run featuring randomized elements, including the enemies you’ll face and the upgrades you’ll earn along the way. With the help of her mentor, fellow titan Hecate, and a cast of new and returning gods, shades, and all those in between, Hades 2 sets out strongly from the get-go with a story that is gripping to watch unfold between runs.
For all of its improvements, Hades 2 doesn’t initially look or feel that different from the original. Both games operate with the same isometric viewpoint, and Melinoe moves with the same speed and grace as her brother, albeit with some slight changes. Unlike Zagreus, Melinoe is far less dash-happy, with a longer cooldown between each of her evasive bursts of speed that’s initially awkward to get used to. This is offset by a greater emphasis on maintaining speed through sprinting, which you engage by holding down the dash button right after executing it.
This sprint provides the same degree of damage-avoidance Zagreus enjoys but feeds into additional offensive options. And some enemies are designed specifically to punish a reliance on just dashing to encourage a shift in mindset. The sprint can also be upgraded with boons, the random upgrades you receive at various points during a run, in a similar fashion to your standard attacks, letting your sprint shock foes with Zeus’ lighting, or knock back entire groups of them with the powerful waves of Poseidon. This tangible change is a taste of how Hades 2 approaches evolving a strong, established formula by making small, sometimes experimental, changes that have a profound effect on the way you approach gameplay.
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Nowhere is this more evident than the expansion of Melinoe’s offensive repertoire. She maintains the trio of options that her brother had with standard, special, and cast attacks; both the standard and special attacks are determined by your selection of a weapon when you begin a run. This is already delightfully varied, with the starting Witch Staff offering a nice balance between safe ranged melee strikes, while others, such as the Sister Blades, demand a bolder approach, since their limited range forces you to really get in the face of enemies.
Melinoe’s cast ability is also far more useful without boons than Zagreus’s awkward red diamond projectile ever was. In keeping with her witch abilities, Melinoe can throw down a circular ring that confines enemies inside it for a brief period of time, making it an effective crowd-controlling option at its default tier. Boons from the gods can radically evolve it, though, turning the defensive snare into a more offensive area-of-effect spell that decimates large groups of foes or inflicts harmful curses on them. These can also be combined with other boons that augment your standard weapons to create a deadly mixture of skills.
Melinoe’s cast ability is just one of the biggest changes Hades 2 introduces for its refined approach to combat. Each of your three attacks can also be channeled into new Omega attacks, which you can think of as alternative fire modes for each. The standard attack of the slow and cumbersome Moonstone Axe can be channeled into a fast and devastating spinning attack, for example, while the single shots of the Black Coat’s special attack can transform into a lock-on missile barrage that quickly melts away lonesome enemies. These are powered by magic, which is a new resource you need to manage between each skirmish. It refills automatically as you enter a new room, encouraging you to maximize its usage during each battle while also making you think about ways to keep it topped up while you’re in the thick of things.
All of these combat abilities are empowered by gifts Melinoe receives from the various characters you’ll run into during each run. There are familiar faces, such as Aphrodite and Hermes, as well as entirely new ones. Hestia, for example, offers her flame damage-dealing boons as a way to introduce damage-over-time strategies to Melinoe’s repertoire, while Hera’s new Hitch curse lets you mark several enemies and then deal damage to all of them simultaneously. Each boon gives you specific elemental abilities to play around with, letting you cobble together a combination that plays off each one’s strengths to make the most of a run.
… big, bold swings have established Hades 2 as one of the best roguelites you’re likely ever going to play
With six distinct weapons to use, more boons to imbue them with, a variety of keepsakes from friends and foes that influence runs, and a handful of animal familiars to choose from, Hades 2 provides so many levers to pull and knobs to turn that it’s unlikely you’ll ever feel like you’re doomed to an inconsequential run. Yes, you’ll still have ones that go a lot better (or worse) than others, but there wasn’t one I played that didn’t feel instructive or enlightening in some way.
All of these options are also introduced at a steady but measured pace, never overwhelming you with new mechanics before you’ve got a grasp of those you have access to. Each new wrinkle is another piece in a larger puzzle that eventually lets you have more consistently successful runs, rewarding the thought you’ve put into both the preparation before them and the execution of a build during each one. It’s an engrossing formula that makes the much-lauded original seem like a nascent idea by comparison, and exemplifies the ambition shown by Supergiant Games with its sequel. It would’ve been easier to make smaller, iterative changes to a highly-regarded combat loop, but big, bold swings have established Hades 2 as one of the best roguelites you’re likely ever going to play.
This additional depth to combat is kept entertaining thanks to an entirely new roster of enemies to contend with, many of which demand a quick understanding of the new combat avenues available to you and how best to take advantage of them. Simple, slow-swinging brutes might be commonplace in the first few encounters of a run, but they’re quickly supplanted by seemingly neverending waves of small but deadly floating fish in later ones, or heavily armored soldiers that require quick reflexes to keep out of their wide-reaching melee strikes. Boss encounters are the true standouts though, ranging from an interesting roster of mid-bosses that you’ll encounter quite frequently, to the show-stopping skirmishes that await you at the end of each biome.
These are massive climactic battles against Hades 2’s most-challenging foes, each with their own fascinating theme around them. A standout is Scylla and the Sirens, which pits you against three foes with distinct abilities in a musically charged battle that borders on overwhelming the first few times you undertake it. It’s a layered battle that challenges you to cleverly balance which of the three you’re going to focus on at a given time in order to remove their respective attack from the equation. This is just one of many that are both audio and visual treats, crammed with eye-catching effects and accentuated by Hades 2’s exceptional soundtrack, composed again by Darren Korb. The music melds a thumping double-bass and roaring electric guitar with the smooth vocals of Ashley Barrett, who continues to outdo themself with each new game they feature in. It’s tough to pick a favorite among the pairs work across Supergiant’s suite of games, but there hasn’t been one this varied and full-bodied as this.
Each of Hades 2’s biomes also marks a departure from the environments from the first game, which might be a relief to hear given you’ll be mostly traversing the depths of Hades again. Alternative paths lead you to new areas that are bursting with color and character, with Supergiant’s distinctive art style shown in its best light here. Hades 2 features an outstanding reimagining of the depths of Hell, which is accentuated by the nostalgic return of familiar spaces in the game’s later, and more climatic, sections.
It’s surprising, too, that traveling down the levels of Hades is not the only path you can take, with an entirely different route to take during a run opened a few hours into your playthrough. This expands Hades 2’s content well beyond what was offered in the original game, with the original four biomes supplanted by more than twice that. This expansion doesn’t come at the expense of quality either, with each biome rendered in Supergiant’s immediately recognizable art style. Hades 2 is the best looking game the studio has delivered yet, and the richest it’s ever crafted, with an immense amount of detail poured into each space that gives them presence within the wider mythos of Hades’ world. The scorched streets of a city ravaged by war stand in contrast to the clinically clean halls of the usurped underworld, the underwater boiling rooms of the siren’s forgotten nightclub opening out to wide open fields littered with lost souls. Hades 2’s world is diverse and memorable, and not just because you’ll be traveling though it time and time again.
The areas are also more mechanically varied, with a few offering larger spaces that you can explore while giving you the chance to choose which routes to take and when. It serves to break up the monotony of moving strictly from one room to the next linearly, but the sheer variety on offer makes it difficult for that to ever feel like a problem that needs solving in the first place. The choices of which narrative threads to follow, along with the quantity of content added to the overall package, just further show how much more ambitious Supergiant is with its first-ever sequel.
While you’ll spend the majority of your time dungeon-crawling your way to success, Hades 2 puts a bigger emphasis on what you do in between runs, too. The Crossroads, a refuge that sits between the base of Mount Olympus and the depth of Hades, acts as the sequel’s analog to the first game’s House of Hades post-run hangout spot, offering up a multitude of base-building options that all have tangible impacts on your effectiveness during runs. A large, bubbling cauldron in the center lets you combine resources to unlock new parts of the Crossroads, as well as helpful shops and newer resource types to collect when you venture back out. A small garden lets you plant specific seeds that sprout while you’re out, folding back into the requirements for more expansion via the aforementioned cauldron.
The Crossroads also includes specific activity spaces that let you take characters out on small dates, both friendly and a little more intimate, which provide more environments for more narrative progression to take place in. Customization options are also more expansive than in Hades, letting you decorate and personalize the space to make it feel more homey between each run. While Hades 2 makes it easy to bounce from one run to the next, having a little more to do between them is a welcome addition.
Paramount to permanent character progression is a new arcana card system that replaces Zagreus’s one-dimensional upgrade mirror from the first game. Each card gives you an advantage of some sort during your run. This can be as simple as rewarding you with a Death Defiance, which keeps you alive after an otherwise fatal blow, or buffing your total magic and health even before a run starts. Others, like the ability to deal additional damage to foes with two curses, or buffing damage while your magic isn’t fully replenished, define a tone and strategy to your run before starting, helping you craft your play style accordingly as you go.
The number of arcana cards you can equip is determined by your Grasp, a numerical total that you can expand with a different resource as you chip away at runs. Each card has an associated cost depending on its overall effect, so you’re challenged to balance which ones to equip based on your capabilities at a given time. The more cards you unlock, and the more Grasp you obtain, the bigger advantage you take into a run, and thus the greater chance you have of completion. It’s a far more dynamic system than the on-off switches in the previous game, tying in nicely to the already deeper choices you have available in combat.
The Crossroads is also integral to the way Hades 2 tells its tale. The stakes of the story are more profound here, trading Zagreus’s petulant plight to escape his home with a wide-reaching conflict that threatens not only Melinoe and her family, but every corner of the underworld, the surface above, and the gods looking down from the mountaintop. Chronos is a suitably harrowing villain who consistently pops up to threaten you as you’re nearing him, while also reveling in all your defeats, making the many times you’ll best him satisfying victories.
Hades 2 is a game that is essential to experience
But Chronos is just one of many fantastic foils along the way, with Hades 2 giving time for each main antagonist to shine in their own way. They, along with your allies at The Crossroads, all react believably to each of your actions, remarking on your weapon choices, the boons you’ve picked up along the way, the manners in which you were defeated, and more. Just like in the first game, this is where Hades 2 really distinguishes itself from its peers in the genre, with the unbelievable way in which its script incorporates each of your actions fluidly into its core narrative to make it feel like the story is being written as you play. It’s the strongest hook that the original game possessed, one that no peer has matched since, and one that Hades 2 surpasses so effortlessly.
The roster of characters you’ll interact with is also much larger than in Hades. The Crossroads is home to a variety of different personalities, such as the sassy but insecure shade, Dora; the masterful tactician Odysseus; and another of Nyx’s many offspring, Nemesis. The gods that you’ll meet along your path also lean more into their recognizable archetypes, with newer additions to the cast such as Narcissus, Prometheus, and Icarus standing out the most.
Voice acting is exceptional throughout, a feat made even more impressive only once you’ve experienced what seems like an endless stream of captivating dialogue that empowers the hundreds of permutations you can come across each run. Melinoe is often witness to the incessant bickering between the pantheon of gods, titans, and those caught in between, and sometimes the cruelty they let spill out into the world, but Hades 2 deftly interweaves brevity and witty writing that keeps the tale endearing. It’s captivating to watch Melinoe’s relationships with each of these characters evolve with each passing night, making you crave each new interaction and giving the story more depth than the revenge plot at its core.
Whether you were witness to all the work done on Hades 2 during early access or not, there’s no denying how much effort developer Supergiant Games has put into this masterful sequel. Hades 2 is one of the best roguelite experiences ever, with clever improvements to its established formula that accentuate its strongest attributes. More importantly, it achieves this without requiring you to be the most well-versed player on what came before, but not at the expense of offering a new challenge to those that have spent hours digging away at the first game’s most brutal endeavors. It’s deeper and more complex than the original in every way, from its greatly expanded combat system to its larger, more complex web of character interactions that powers its more ambitious narrative.
Hades 2 is a game that is essential to experience, with all of its parts coalescing into a memorable adventure that you will likely lose dozens of hours to without regret.
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