Princess Against The Damned (Hades II)

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Good to return to the glorious Diablo style, roguelike hack'n'slash that has been in early access for quite a while. I've played the first game, and this one even back then, now perfected to its core, its contents enhancing the foundation while so much new stuff.

Hades II is that seminal sequel that you tell your friends to spend that last remaining money you have, you have bills to pay? Who cares, just play this game and all your problems will be swept away. The battles will be legendary, creeps will force you to adjust, adapt, weapons selections be insane. While Melinoë might not be as strong as Zangreus, she still brings a lot of firepower.

It plays kind of safe however, some part of its story anyway, but the overall quality is a big step-up, and I mean, you don't need me to convince you. Supergiant spared no time to make this the best they possibly could, even with its new visual make-up.

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• Finding family through feuds

Taking place directly after the first game, Hades and Persephone conceived a child, a baby daughter and sister to Zangreus. A bit short time later, Chronos wakes up, vows vengeance against Olympus for locking him up, and the after story is the sister taking back the underworld.

Dire straits are barely putting it, everything has almost gone wrong, even Hades closest followers are scattered, some of them finding safety for little Melinoë before she grows up to fight. She is a Witch type, so most of her attacks, specials, and casts are heavily range based. Though, a few times you'll use something like the axe, and it's a complete different playing field.

You'll meet new characters, but come across many of the early familiars too. Though, no one seems to be seeing eye to eye, Heccate is pretty busy growing her favorite child soldier for the war, while Nemesis in her own negative viewpoint questions everything.

This is where you start to feel separated from getting more immersed into the story, much the prior games did. While it's nice to know how expanded the Hades lore is, it's important since you're going to interact with them a lot for boons, hexes, and such, to better get the understanding of what's happening. But it's a lot of onions to peel, so get your thinking caps on.

Gameplay, as usual is its core strength, is the more prominent part of the game. But with how difficult the enemies are, higher in numbers, and their crazy variety of attacks, you have to be super resourceful how you spend them. It took me six runs to finish two main bosses for both domain, and easily have unlocked four different kinds of weapons. But, there's more, you have to look around the place for items to extract by mining, fishing, talking to the ghosts, and so on.

Regarding if the main gameplay has fully evolved, it's more of the same but on a complete different playing field. Even the bosses gave me a lot of hard time, but because I've spent so much time playing games, I probably understood how to advance better.

But it isn't till the eight run that the game really changed, resources are easier to fine (or maybe it's my RNG improving). The Hexes have upgrade trees now, that I could easily lose if I die in the run, but I managed to snag a Death Defiance real soon, and continued to progress through the tougher battles readily while lucking out on the best choices of skills and upgrades.

That being said, the boons, upgrades, and such, they're way too balanced here, almost as if the game was made for the absolute puritans who want a robust, challenging game, but never allowing too much to get in the way of being broken. Because why not, sometimes it'll be nice to have broken weapons, going crazy with them wreaking havoc, just having an absolute blast.

Also, if you're getting tired of fighting to the deepest part of the underworld below to reach Cronos, at some point you can also take the fight to mount Olympus only if you've unlocked the incantation to remove the barrier for it. I haven't gotten there yet, but I've heard things get real interesting.

• Olympus favorite warmachine

Not all battles are fought alone, you will get help in certain encounter areas, like Artemis or even Nemesis. I've mentioned how tough some of the battles are, they get really crazy when you venture absolute further. Even further enhancing the power trip.

You earn way more items like Nectar, those to unlock more Arcana, and in extension some new systems encouraging me to rely on the gods for help.

Sometimes words alone can't describe how big this game stepped up, in breadth of content, updating its fundamentals and game design, and just look how gorgeous it is. The cell shaded art has these lighting shades and shimmering even in unnoticeable places of each character art. We're living in the best of times for animation to supersede, and this is how it's done.

In a dozen hour I played, I've seen a lot, and there's seems to be way more coming on the way. I might not like the story, but for all it has, it's hard to not say it doesn't succeed over the last game entirely. We're so stocked up on GOTY releases, it's hard to pick which one will win.

I also like how naive Melinoë is, willingly conversing with everyone having such curiosity and super polite without much of the wise cracking from her older brother. She's still young so she has a lot to learn from.

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Above screenshots and GIFs are from personal recordings only

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