Posted on: April 24, 2025
xXBalthorXx
Games: Reviews: 15
Great unless you're... scared of women?
For some reason, the unverified rating on this game has sat on a middling 2-3 stars since launch, despite being by far the best and most engaging twist on the Hades formula to come out since... well, Hades 1. I guess people blindly review-bomb it here because they're put off by its strong female lead LOL. On Steam, which requires owning the game to review it, it's sat at an 80+ percent from day one, wonder why. To talk about the game itself, it's incredibly solid and fun to play, and it has fantastic visuals, music and overall design. I had zero info or hype going into it - picked it up after a quick look at the store page and without even touching the trailer (I'm one of those old-timers who hates stuff autoplaying and would rather read & look at screenshots, like the back of a case). Immediately, I'm hit by a banger of an opening theme that leaves me idle on the main menu just listening to it in full - turns out it's by a real rock/metal band called Djerv - and then I sink my teeth into the game proper until I beat the first boss and return to the home base. Absolutely solid, intuitive and fun. Now, the game has some caveats, mostly down to the usual "rogueLITE" genre tropes which I loathe, but it also deals with them better than most its peers, including Hades itself! There's only a single metacurrency (thank god!), the progression is split off into increasingly longer & harder runs unlocked as you beat bosses which is far better pacing, more variety is introduced faster as you progress, and overall it's much less of a slog with not nearly as many 'required deaths' to unlock mechanics and unfold the story - good lord, Hades is good but it expects you to waste your damn life at it! The remaining pain points IMO are the basic upgrade grind (which I gladly expedited with CE) and some clearly suboptimal loadout options, but overall everything clicks and works well together, and you have an 'easy to play, hard to master' gameplay with fun characters, story & art.
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