At this point I’ve written so many reviews that I’m sure I’ve given a generic introduction about each game genre. For a refresher on roguelikes: I think having to restart the game every time you die is an overly harsh punishment, I find replaying the same thirty minutes to three hours of a game over and over again boring, and I dislike how most of these games don’t have a story beyond the loosest background excuse for why your character is here. Despite these feelings there are a few roguelikes that I’ve truly enjoyed and the first Hades is near the top of that list thanks to its heavy focus on characters, story, and a feeling of progression even when replaying the same game fifty times. The best I could hope for with Hades II is that it would be a similar experience.
The nicest and most important thing to say about Hades II is that it is Hades again but with even more content. You once again play a child of Hades whose objective is to push through four gauntlets of monsters with the help of boons from the Greek pantheon and the usual roguelike nonsense of random weapon, magic, and health upgrades along the way. Combat is still isometric with a half dozen weapons using light and special attacks, though there is more of a focus on ranged and AOE attacks in Hades II than its predecessor, emphasized by the single target magic projectile from Hades replaced by an large circle of debuffs and damage in Hades II. The move sets of the weapons are also deeper thanks to omega attacks, where every weapon has extra abilities if you hold the attack button down rather than just pressing it. These moves are mostly slower, more powerful, and hit a wider area but they cost Magick (think mana in other games) to use so you have another resource to empower alongside your health if you want to use these abilities throughout longer battles.
Along with expanded weapon move sets and a new spell resource system, the biggest injection of new content in Hades II is simply that: a whole second area to play through. Compared to Hades, which only had the same four stages to grind to eternity, Hades II has eight with additional enemy types and bosses for a tremendous shake-up when it comes to variety. This is naturally an incredible amount of game and many people have praised it for helping alleviate the boredom that can come from every roguelike run eventually feeling “the same,” because now you can just go to a completely different area and do that instead. New enemies, new bosses, new NPCs, and new buffs, all there and waiting for you when you get bored of whatever brick wall you’re either losing to or smashing for the fifth time in a row. Compared to the first Hades experience this is practically Hades II and Hades III in one game and is a fantastic addition, though the second arena is slightly more difficult and… experimental than the default locations. They break the mold a little with some of the music, enemy, and level designs, and while it’s not the end of the world it does feel like they were taking a “no bad ideas” approach to a lot of the second part of the game just to make it feel more unique.
Speaking of unique, Hades II still has that special sauce that the first Hades had where it feels like there is just an endless amount of things to see and hear, which isn’t something you find in most other roguelikes. The story is front and center again just like in Hades, with your successes and failures on every run weaving into the narrative and your many companions responding to the story as in develops and seemingly always having something different to say. In this way it rarely feels like you’re stuck in a rut as characters like Hecate, Odysseus, and Nemesis will almost always say new things when you return home, which is rare enough in an RPG and even rarer in a roguelike. The “inevitable progression” is also present in Hades II due to investing materials and resources into permanent upgrades for your character, so no runs feel pointless or wasted because you’ll have picked up a few new crafting components or bits of soul energy that will let you power up your weapons, passive traits, or animal companions (yes they added animal companions too!) to do even better in the future. As good as the gameplay feels and as beautiful as the art is, this paragraph is the reason I love these games and without hyperbole it’s the reason I bother to play them at all.
All of that being said, if you haven’t played the first Hades I’d recommend playing that first over Hades II and I think Hades is a better game overall. There are three reasons for this and only one of them is petty so we’ll save that one for last, but the first is all the new crafting in Hades II. Main character Melinoë is a witch and so they decided to add lots of brewing and alchemy to the game in the form of a big cauldron, chanting, and needing to gather hundreds of thousands of spell components throughout Hades II. You need to find plant seeds that then need to grow so you can harvest them, there’s a fucking MINING mechanic as you take a pickaxe to silver and bronze for weapon crafting, and each of your weapons has multiple “forms” that can be leveled up five times through combinations of materials. It’s all just. So. Tiring. To the game’s credit it tries to help with the ability to mark certain spells and weapons as “important” so that you get hints while you’re playing that one path will help you with your desired ingredients more than another, but every time I came back from a run without having found any randomly dropped driftwood or marble I wanted to scream. Even as I’m still playing it now seeing “you need X more poppy flowers and Y more chaos dust and Z more garlic” just makes me think of all the survival crafting games out there with similar gatekeeping grindathons and makes me wonder why Hades of all things needed something like that.
On a more positive point the second reason you should play Hades before Hades II is for the story. Melinoë is driven to be our player character due to an assault on the Underworld by Chronos, Titan of Time, who has banished/imprisoned or otherwise done away with all of the main characters from the first game and is also arranging an assault on Olympus itself. As the secret daughter of Hades and raised from a young age to strike down Chronos, Melinoë’s story is one of revenge and a yearning for the family that was stolen from her, and I think it resonates more with the player if they played Hades first and grew to connect with the characters that have now been torn from us. Seeing these characters brought low means so much more if we’ve seen the heights they achieved in the first game, in my opinion, though there is also the argument to be made that Melinoë never knew her family so going in blind with just the vague knowledge of these characters put you more firmly in her shoes. Hades II also has a lot of references to the previous game through returning characters like Schelemeus, secret levels revisiting old areas, and other things that really makes playing the games in order feel like a no-brainer. There is also an argument to be made that the first Hades had a better, more personal story compared to Melinoë’s shattered world assassination quest, but I don’t mind higher stakes in sequels.
The last point and reason why I think Hades is a better experience is just a few very questionable design decisions with certain bosses. This is the petty reason so feel free to mutter “get good” under your breath and skip this paragraph, but you could also consider the following: let’s say you’re playing a video game where throughout the entire game if an enemy creates a glowing AOE effect you need to avoid it. This is video games 101: boss waves hands and some horrible glowing icon appears you’d better get the hell out of there before something blows you up or traps you in place. Now let’s pretend there’s a boss where almost all of their attacks are like this except for one attack, ONE ATTACK, where if you aren’t standing on the glowing icon you instantly die. No warning, nothing to indicate that this attack is different from any other. You just die and are left scratching your head. Wouldn’t this be misleading? Wouldn’t this be a failure of game design with half a dozen other ways to make this clearer to the player? Meanwhile another boss has just an enemy swarm ability that completely invalidates certain strategies depending on your skill level while a third has no health bar at all for the sake of “cinema.” This health bar thing has been a major pet peeve of mine since Ninja Gaiden 3 and is really just there because the boss is more phase based than health based, which is just misleading. Seriously, the fight isn’t only based on damage but also depends on you surviving long enough for the boss to deliver threats and you to clap back with one liners. It’s epic and intimidating the first time but by the tenth (since this is a roguelike you’ll inevitably have to keep fighting this guy) it’s just annoying.
Put all together, Hades II brings much of what everyone loved about the first Hades back (the writing, the gameplay, the music, the art style) and then gives you a third helping on top of it. This is where I would say there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing and for 90% of the game that’s true, but the back 10% is the same grinding pit that made me temporarily sour on Hades‘ post-game true ending grind; made worse by Hades II having even more resource grinding inherently built in from the start. If you loved Hades then Hades II is a game that I’m sure you will enjoy, and if you like roguelikes combined with resource crafting collectathons from games like V Rising and Palworld then you’ll probably like Hades II more than the first one. As for me I’m writing this review on the inevitable emotional downswing after playing this game for forty hours and knowing that (just like the first game) my future is a montage of feeding every companion nectar nonstop to raise our relationship levels. It doesn’t help that my crafting materials for weapon upgrades are sitting at 8/15, so that that’s five plus more runs before I can progress that particular item. The game is fun and I will eventually 100% it just like I did with Hades, but I don’t see the appeal in adding the clutter that they did and I’ll be taking a break soon.
