Post by WickedCrustacean on Sept 22, 2022 10:42:30 GMT -5
Hades is an interesting roguelike based around dying, Ancient Greek Mythology, and twitchy combat. You play the role of Zagreus, the son of Hades, God of the Underworld. As soon as the game starts, you seek to escape the gloomy confines of your dad's domain, and seek freedom topside, and eventually that morphs into a quest to reunite with your lost mother. With lots of tongue-in-cheek humor, your old man sets his army of underlings, including such iconic characters as the three-headed dog Cerberus, god of death Thanatos, the 3 Furies, and an assorted variety of other servants to stop you.
The game consists of individual runs where you start at the bottom of the Underworld in your house, and work your way up through the different levels of Hades toward the surface. There are several layers: bottom-most Hades with a sequence of procedural rooms, Asfadel - which consists of small islands floating in lava, Elysium - where haughty dead heroes prance around on green fields in between trying to kill you, and finally the temple of Styx on the surface. To get through each level, you have to fight your way through something like 10-15 encounters without dying. If you die, you are taken on the River Styx back to your House and have to start over again.
Hades is presented in pretty isometric type graphics but with a cell shaded look. The art style is done very well, and there are a ton of effects, animations, and other eye-candy, without much gore. The soundtrack is also very good.
The combat is quite fun, as long as you realize that it's pretty twitchy. You get to select your weapon at the start of the run, initially only a few weapons are available, but as you play, you unlock more. Stygius, a famous sword from mythology is the first weapon you get, but in due time, you can unlock a spear, a shield, a bow, fighting knuckles, and even a railgun. Each of these can also be customized along several branches. Each weapon plays quite differently, requiring different tactics. With each, you get your standard attack, your special attack, your dash attack, and in some cases, some other stuff.
Hitting the Space key results in your character dashing forward very quickly in a blur, and this works for dodging enemy attacks, and general mobility. So in a typical fight, you will be dashing all over the place to get between enemy attacks, and then hitting them like a meat grinder from all sides. It is all very hectic, and during some tough boss fights, my fingers actually got tired like after a gym workout from all that clicking. But with that said, there is something undeniably fun about watching yourself flash around in a blur, hitting enemies all around in a glorious extravaganza of special effects and numbers floating up.
So Hades is a game where you do runs of trying to get as far as you can, and then die at some point, and start over. How is this fun? Well, aside from the joy of hectic combat, there are 2 things that make Hades fun: dialogue and boons.
Every run you do, you get to talk to the various NPCs in the underworld, ranging from the servants in Hades, to the various Olympic gods who come to your aide, trying to help you escape the underworld. It is amazing how much dialogue this studio created, because after something like 50 runs that it took me to complete the main story, every character had new lines every single time. A lot of it is just fluff of course, but there are some interesting tidbits here and there, and all of it adds up to create a nice Greek mythology atmosphere, with all the gods delivering their lines and bickering with each other.
The boons are the real star of the game. Essentially, on every run, the way you develop your character is by getting these boons from the various Olympic gods trying to help you. So Zeus might grant you a boon to call on a special spell to cast mass chain lightning in an area, or Aphrodite might grant you a book to increase your attack while weakening the enemy. These are completely random, though once you get boons from a particular god, you are more likely to get more from that god during that run. So each run, you get to build a very individual character just for that run and see how it matches up to your other builds.
It took me about 45 hours to complete the main quest, though you can still keep playing well after that, trying to get all the achievements, unlock all the stuff, etc. The game has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, and while I think this is a bit overrated, I did like it quite a bit, and would recommend it to anyone interested in a "light" game for a change of pace, as long as you don't have finger arthritis. Or want to get it.
The game consists of individual runs where you start at the bottom of the Underworld in your house, and work your way up through the different levels of Hades toward the surface. There are several layers: bottom-most Hades with a sequence of procedural rooms, Asfadel - which consists of small islands floating in lava, Elysium - where haughty dead heroes prance around on green fields in between trying to kill you, and finally the temple of Styx on the surface. To get through each level, you have to fight your way through something like 10-15 encounters without dying. If you die, you are taken on the River Styx back to your House and have to start over again.
Hades is presented in pretty isometric type graphics but with a cell shaded look. The art style is done very well, and there are a ton of effects, animations, and other eye-candy, without much gore. The soundtrack is also very good.
The combat is quite fun, as long as you realize that it's pretty twitchy. You get to select your weapon at the start of the run, initially only a few weapons are available, but as you play, you unlock more. Stygius, a famous sword from mythology is the first weapon you get, but in due time, you can unlock a spear, a shield, a bow, fighting knuckles, and even a railgun. Each of these can also be customized along several branches. Each weapon plays quite differently, requiring different tactics. With each, you get your standard attack, your special attack, your dash attack, and in some cases, some other stuff.
Hitting the Space key results in your character dashing forward very quickly in a blur, and this works for dodging enemy attacks, and general mobility. So in a typical fight, you will be dashing all over the place to get between enemy attacks, and then hitting them like a meat grinder from all sides. It is all very hectic, and during some tough boss fights, my fingers actually got tired like after a gym workout from all that clicking. But with that said, there is something undeniably fun about watching yourself flash around in a blur, hitting enemies all around in a glorious extravaganza of special effects and numbers floating up.
So Hades is a game where you do runs of trying to get as far as you can, and then die at some point, and start over. How is this fun? Well, aside from the joy of hectic combat, there are 2 things that make Hades fun: dialogue and boons.
Every run you do, you get to talk to the various NPCs in the underworld, ranging from the servants in Hades, to the various Olympic gods who come to your aide, trying to help you escape the underworld. It is amazing how much dialogue this studio created, because after something like 50 runs that it took me to complete the main story, every character had new lines every single time. A lot of it is just fluff of course, but there are some interesting tidbits here and there, and all of it adds up to create a nice Greek mythology atmosphere, with all the gods delivering their lines and bickering with each other.
The boons are the real star of the game. Essentially, on every run, the way you develop your character is by getting these boons from the various Olympic gods trying to help you. So Zeus might grant you a boon to call on a special spell to cast mass chain lightning in an area, or Aphrodite might grant you a book to increase your attack while weakening the enemy. These are completely random, though once you get boons from a particular god, you are more likely to get more from that god during that run. So each run, you get to build a very individual character just for that run and see how it matches up to your other builds.
It took me about 45 hours to complete the main quest, though you can still keep playing well after that, trying to get all the achievements, unlock all the stuff, etc. The game has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, and while I think this is a bit overrated, I did like it quite a bit, and would recommend it to anyone interested in a "light" game for a change of pace, as long as you don't have finger arthritis. Or want to get it.