Hades

-Quick Review-Hades is a lesson in patience and persistence. It’s lining up the “Skill”, “Luck”, and “Experience” circles in a Venn diagram. If you’ve got more skill and luck, you’ll make progress faster. If you’ve got more luck and experience, you can compensate for skills or natural aptitude. And if you’ve got no luck, you can still grind your way to success with developing skills and getting experience playing the game (Best of all as you grind you’ll level up skills which literally improve you luck, so even an poor unlucky soul like me can get some of that luck-o-matic-magic).Hades is a Roguelite Action RPG developed by Super Giant Games and released in 2020; I’ve loved everything about Hades, from its music to its gameplay, to its voice acting, to its theming and art style, and I can easily recommend the game to pretty much anyone!I had been busy working on other games, and suddenly I noticed a good Sale for Hades, and I told my wife “Hey, this is a must buy game”. Then I promptly started streaming it on Twitch. While everyone is over there having fun playing Hades 2, I’m back here playing Hades 1 …and living my best life! -Detailed breakdown review-Story: The story just tosses you right in. You’re playing as Zagreus the son of Hades, as he attempts to escape the various layers of the underworld and make it to the surface. Zagreus will fight his way through Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of **** all likelihood your first run will be unsuccessful… correction; it would be incredible and unbelievable to successfully escape on your first run with zero experience in the game. Expect to fail, expect to fail a lot. But after every run you’ll return to the Hall of Hades to get dialogue and exposition from the narrator and various colorful characters to fill in the background of who Zagreus is, and why he’s hellbent on getting to the surface.I intentionally want to avoid talking about specific story details because uncovering the story bit by bit is another extremely rewarding experience from your subsequent playthroughs. The important story detail to remember is this: even when I failed an attempt, I went back to the beginning and had new character interactions, new stuff to unlock, and a fresh run with a fresh change to try mixing different boons and upgrades together to see what kind of smorgasbord-soup I could cook up.Hades’ story kept my attention the whole time, sure it’s disappointing when I lose on a run that I was so certain I was going to succeed! But after a loss I’d just dust myself off and give it another try, again, and again. Gameplay: Hades is played from an isometric view and has some hack and slash inspired combat elements to it. You have a Primary attack which is your basic damage dealing move, A Secondary Attack called a “Cast” which is unique and changes with different god’s boons and is limited in how many “cast” points you have, each weapon also has a Special Attack which will change drastically based on the weapon, and lastly there’s also a Dash move to quickly side step attacks, jump through barriers, and you can also attack while dashing!My first experience playing Hades was clearing the first set of levels until promptly being destroyed by the first boss. Then went back to the Hall of Hades and spent my darkness to get permanent upgrades, unlocked new weapons with my keys, and then dived right back into it with another escape attempt… I continued to fight to get to back to that boss and dying to it several times until I got a good run where I beat the boss, then rinse and repeat on the next zone fighting my way out of the underworld until after 24 hours total gametime and roughly 35 attempts, I got my first successful escape!The underworld is said to be in constant flux, and chambers will move around so each time you play you’ll encounter different chambers from the last time you visited. You’ll find chambers which reward you darkness, coins, keys, god boons, skill levels, the Hammer Artifact which improves your weapon somehow, and more.Conclusion: As I said at the start of this review: I can easily recommend Hades to pretty much anyone! Hades is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I’d absolutely put it on my top 10 list if I made top 10 lists.There hasn’t been any game Supergiant has put out that I haven’t loved, but Hades has blown me away, the story was engaging, the gameplay was compelling and enjoyable, I will be playing the music from the game for the rest of my life, and as bonus points Hades has extremely good replay value and lots of ways to add extra challenge to the game! If you haven’t played Hades yet, you should absolutely give it a shot. I'm confident you’ll agree with me on how great this game is. ...There's more to the review, but I'm out of Characters... If you want to know more, please check out my YouTube Video or Steam Review.

Not my favorite kind of game play BUT I really enjoyed the challenge and art and characters too much to fully dislike this game. Im not too big on restarting all the way at the beginning once i get super far if i die. But the game does compensate by allowing you to level up and reward you with tons of upgrades once that does happen. AND providing some cool story too. Its good if you take your time with the game and not try to rush it.

I didn't enjoy it as much as people said online, but I don't think it's a bad game either. It's okay.

Got it gifted to me after watching two of my friends froth out the mouth over it and uhhhhh it's fine. Sure, the graphics are really polished and the high speed gameplay is really engaging, but the music and voice lines are legitimately so annoying to me that I've just been playing with most of the audio muted. Not to mention, some of the enemies themselves often end up turning the combat into feeling more akin to something like Contra with the infuriating amount of bullets and attacks being thrown at you. Most of the actual gameplay itself is fine, but there's definitely more I dislike than enjoy.

The RNG in this game can either benefit you or screw you over. If the latter you may as well just quit because you aren't going to be able to do anything. Actually the opposite of fun when that happens. Super overrated.