Hades 2

Needed to try something else before jumping into Act 3 of Silksong so 1.0 arrived at just the right time here.

I'd played around a dozen hours of early access, so was pretty far in already, but have now beaten Chronos once and got to the top of 'the surface' route once. Really, really loving it - it's been a few years since I played Hades 1, but it feels like they've increased the capacity for creating really delightfully broken builds here.

Have had particularly good runs with the Umbral Flames. In my successful Chronos run I basically had a collection of boons that gave me infinite mana for special attacks, as the attacks would refresh the mana automatically. In a really good surface run last night I had a special attack that hit enemies like a bomb, though needed a bit more maintenance as each attack took so much more mana and required frequent manual refreshes. It helped that I had a bonus special that turned non-boss enemies into sheep - and that recharged basically once every few seconds due to the amount of mana I was burning through :P

Anyway, it's great being back playing Hades, and have hit that point of the game with plenty of upgrades where you really have an opportunity to hit very, very hard. Level design is fantastic and really varied, though some bosses can be pretty punishing. Dizzying amount of stuff to do as well.

Finished the story over the weekend. Terrific overall - just loved how broken some builds could get. Still a few times I ran into situations where the power curve just wasn’t quite enough to get to the end, but usually there was more than enough options to adapt or improvise.

The surface route is terrific fun - two routes with tonnes of choices followed by rapidly increasing tension in the final two. Darren Korb’s score really builds to a wonderful crescendo there too.

Umbral Flames were definitely my favourite overall (love the ‘refill mana when you attack’ builds particularly), though had some great runs with the backpack and the spear too. Haven’t tried all that much with the axe or skull, but there’s lots of post-game content to dip back into so will certainly be giving some of them a go.

I did enjoy my run using the ‘activate ‘x’ arcana when you defeat a Guardian’ card so would like to have another few runs with that as well.

Eris can be tricky, though I found freeze boons make her a lot easier to manage. She does telegraph her attacks but if you do get in the way of one of her shots - which can easily happen when she has a long aiming wind-up - she can do a lot of damage quickly.

That said, the third boss of the surface route is the one that could put a premature end to quite a few runs for me. Hits like a brick. Even if I eked out a win sometimes his hard hits left me with limited health / no death defiances to finish the run - and the final stage contains a few hard-hitting mini bosses where you need all the health you can get.

That the attack when he telegraphs multipe attacks in a row?

It should be easy to avoid - he tells you what to do! - but when I'm in the zone as much as I usually am in a Hades run the sudden change of pace sometimes melts my brain :P