Hades Review - Page 3
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Article Index
This approach allows the developers to teach you the ropes without overwhelming you with information. Gradually, you learn how everything works, and once you do, the game hits you with some new twist, unveils a new system, or sends you on some new long-term quest.
But if you’re looking for some more traditional progression systems, there’s plenty of that as well. The game has an abundance of currencies that allow you to gradually unlock new weapon aspects and then upgrade them, permanently make your character stronger, unlock new rooms and increase the rewards you get for clearing them.
You also get to gradually learn more about a multitude of NPCs, work on fulfilling various prophecies, redecorate the House of Hades, and so on. Basically, there's always something you could be doing and this keeps things fresh for way longer than you would expect.
In fact, the more I played Hades, the more I enjoyed it. Early on, I had some issues with the game's combat design. I felt that bosses had a touch too much health. I wasn't a fan of the special armored enemies and was already planning an entire paragraph comparing them to the Divinity: Original Sin II's fun-killing armor system.
But as I kept unlocking new options and upgrades, and as my understanding of the game deepened, all those things fell into place and started to make perfect sense.
One last thing to mention here is the game’s difficulty. After beating the final boss once, you’ll be able to use the Pact of Punishment and manually make things harder for yourself. This is essentially Supergiant's signature way of handling difficulty levels, and it definitely works. And on the flip side, if you feel that the game is too hard, there's an option that makes you stronger after every death to let you experience the overarching story without too much hassle.
Technical Information
Since this is a Supergiant title, by now you should expect gorgeous and vibrant visuals, an outstanding soundtrack, and fantastic voice acting. Hades has all of those, although I would argue that its soundtrack doesn’t quite reach the heights of something like Transistor.
When it comes to voice acting, Supergiant’s iconic Logan Cunningham is now just one part of an ensemble cast. This opens the door for some more uneven performances, but none of them can be considered outright bad by any stretch of the imagination.
The game's early access phase didn't go to waste either, and it is now beyond polished. It runs very well, doesn't use a lot of resources, and takes mere moments to save and load. Everything works, and nothing is out of place.
Seeing how Hades was inspired by the roguelike genre, it’s understandable that it uses an autosave system. But you never seem to be more than a minute away from an autosave, so it’s not too bad.
Finally, the game was clearly designed with a controller in mind, which is a bit annoying, because I have no idea how you would play such a fast-paced and precise game with a controller. In my experience, using a keyboard and mouse is beyond preferable here, but this results in somewhat clunky menus.
Conclusion
If we consider Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre as the video game equivalent of Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy, where three decidedly standalone projects by the same creators can be seen as sharing certain stylistic and thematic elements, then Hades would be the end goal of such a long-term endeavor that refines various elements of its predecessors before combining them into one ultimate package.
You take Bastion’s fast-paced combat, Transistor’s modular character-building system, Pyre’s incremental storytelling, and add a coating of Greek mythology on top of it all, and you end up with Hades - an action-RPG you’ll have to try very hard not to enjoy.
