First, a little back story—I tried Supergiant Games’ Bastion back in 2013, early in this site’s history, and it was one of the games that pushed me toward embracing hack-and-slash combat. It arguably began my transformation from hating action games like it to them becoming a specialty. Then Transistor came out and was even better, leading me to believe that the studio would be responsible for many more great games. Pyre ended up being a sizable crack in this perception, proving to be such a self-indulgent, poorly conceived mess that I couldn’t even bother to finish it. I caught some flak for that, though, so when Hades hit Game Pass, I decided that I was going to finish it no matter what. This was a terrible error on my part.

Hades is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler roguelite with a simplistic Gameplay loop, some complex perk combinations reminiscent of Transistor, and a reactive story that sees characters react to just about anything that you do. The problem is that all of the things that you can do are limited to picking perks and killing things in the same four floors of the same dungeon, and the story drags its heels in such an egregious way that you have to finish this same 20-40-minute dungeon something like 50 times to reach the actual ending. Or more, actually, because I only managed to snag the ending after 40 hours of gameplay because my progress was blocked by mystery conditions nobody bothered mentioning, forcing me to look up a guide for how to finish. Even then, it required another 5 or so hours filled with lots of purposeful dying to push NPC conversations forward, and this highlights a bizarre truth about Hades: the only way not to go crazy playing this game is to be terrible at it. Success ruins the pacing in a big way.

[Hey. Hades kind of feels like a freemium game where you pay in time and sanity instead of money, so I don’t feel comfortable putting an affiliate link here. But hey, here’s a link to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which allows me to play through things like this without having to face the bitter reality that I paid money for them. I’m really liking Game Pass. Right now it has Bug Fables and Children of Morta.]

Characters responding to your actions is great, but there are situations where less is more

You play as Zagreus, the runaway son of Hades who ventures out in search of his real mother. The underworld is a dangerous, shifting place, though, and death always returns you to your father’s palace, which is filled with mythological characters. Many of these characters can remark on things that you’ve discovered or done, and Hades himself can even taunt you for your failed attempts. If you beat him, however, he’ll be gone when you return (long story, but you always end up in the same place). This sort of reactivity is the game’s greatest strength—there’s a dizzying amount of voiced dialog that reacts organically to the things you’ve done. If you increase the difficulty with certain modifiers (available after finishing a run for the first time) that give bosses additional abilities, they may comment on their new armor. If you subsequently turn that setting off, they’ll note its absence.

But reactivity is also Hades‘ Achilles’ heel because of the game’s inexplicable decision to permit you a single conversation with each NPC per visit. That means that reacting-to-something conversations often push story-progressing conversations back until your next run, and that’s assuming that the NPC is even present when you return.

Sometimes NPCs are simply missing for no obvious reason. This is great from a “they have their own lives” perspective, but it’s terrible from an “I’ve been repeatedly throwing myself at the same dungeon for 40 hours and would like to end the goddamned story already please” perspective. Characters are written well and their comments are great for the first 20 or so hours, but the second half of the game saw me speed-reading and feeling nothing but contempt for the windbags.

I got the credits to roll after beating the game 10 times, which took about 15-20 hours of learning boss patterns, unlocking permanent upgrades (including other weapons with totally different attack styles that had to be learned), and getting comfortable with the way rooms generated. I’d classify those first 20 hours as a good—but highly repetitive—time. Even at its best, Hades never reaches the interesting story highs of Transistor or the gameplay highs of something like Children of Morta. My last 20 hours with Hades was an utter nightmare of pointless tedium, though. Reaching the “epilogue” ending requires maxing out a bunch of relationships, and this doesn’t only force you to grind out resources through repeated playthroughs with different weapons and modifiers, but it also locks your ability to increase relationships with various characters until you’ve fulfilled some random requirement. Some of these unlock while playing normally. Others are so random that they’d require dozens of hours to luck upon.

And after all of that effort, the epilogue ending is nowhere near fulfilling enough to make up for all of the time and effort it demands of you. Transistor was 10-15 hours and had a solid ending that made sense once you learned about all of the characters. Hades constantly promises you that things are about to happen if you play a little more, only for those things to happen off-screen dozens of hours later than would be reasonable. It took me 36 hours of normal gameplay to talk to one character enough to unlock their arbitrarily locked ability to receive gifts that I grinded for.

Hades‘ gameplay is also a major contributor to the game’s second-half pacing problems

Hades tasks you with running from room to room, sometimes (but not always) choosing which resource you’d like to earn in the next room from 2-3 possibilities. You then fight waves of enemies or a miniboss from one of that area’s maps, after which you pick up that resource and move on. There are all sorts of wrinkles, of course—some rooms are shops, others have chests in them that allow you to fight waves of optional foes to obtain an additional resource, and there are health-restoring rooms that you can add into the mix using the resources that stay with you after your death. And since your escape from the underworld is being aided by the Olympian gods, around a third of the rooms offer an upgrade perk from a specific god.

These upgrades can amplify the effects of other perks, leading to some truly powerful builds. However, you can only ever choose from a list of three perks, and there’s no guarantee that any of them will do anything that benefits the build you’re putting together. You can generally learn what gods specialize in and increase your chances—for example, Ares offers a lot of “doom” perks that allow you to attach a status effect that hits for a large amount of damage after a set amount of time—but sometimes Hades undermines you with a bunch of useless duds.

Skill (and permanent upgrades) can help you to overcome some of Hades‘ fundamental flaws and allow you to survive farther into each run, but the small number of rooms and enemy types it has to draw from causes each playthrough to be almost identical. You start in Tartarus and fight a lot of skulls, blobs, crystals, and club-wielding enemies. Then you fight a Fury boss. After that, you travel through the lava-filled Asphodel, fighting irritating enemies who tunnel underground and jump all over the place on maps to be annoying. Then you fight the Bone Hydra. The third area is Elysium, filled with living chariots (who have no obvious attack animation, so you just sort of take damage near them at random), exploding mini-chariots, and warriors who regenerate if you don’t defeat them twice. Then you fight the insufferable Theseus. Lastly, you randomly from 5 doors looking for the one with a randomized sack that allows you to progress (with the enemies here being especially annoying because of their ability to poison you) and go on to fight Hades as the final boss.

This is every playthrough. High-level resources can only be gained by beating bosses using different weapons, but you still have to beat at least the third boss to gain the resource required for the epilogue ending. Now imagine reaching the final boss over and over again for ~35 hours, each time being greeted by a sliver (or the promise of a sliver after your next run) of story content. Finally, imagine that 75% of the time, you finish that long run and characters are randomly missing or refuse to talk to you about the main story. When the gameplay fails to evolve meaningfully, the story has no excuse to drag its heels when it comes to important stuff. The gameplay wears out its welcome after 20 hours and is insufferable after 40 hours.

You’re expected to die more than I ended up dying, so you’re punished for good play

Toward the end of my time with Hades, when I was considering just dropping it entirely for the sake of my mental health, it became apparent that it’s actively pushing the player in totally different directions. You’re clearly being asked to play well enough to unlock resources that are required to bribe characters and push those relationships forward, but you’re also forced to die often enough that NPC conversations are refreshed (though even that’s not always enough—sometimes you have to equip a perk and get lucky enough to have a certain number of people comment on it or something).

Weapon upgrades are another bizarre way Hades is utterly anti-reward. As you continually use weapons, you eventually learn code words that unlock a secondary moveset for them. I unlocked four of these (out of six weapons) and all of them make the weapon significantly slower and worse. You have to spend resources to unlock these new movesets, and all you get for your effort is crippled. I don’t understand why Hades refuses to reward you for anything. The story fizzles out and isn’t worth the time required to complete it. The gameplay requires a ton of grinding for the privilege of feeling less powerful. It feels backward.

Hades‘ gameplay also suffers from a huge number of problems. The angled camera is a big one, considering that some fights require ducking behind a solid object to avoid ranged enemy attacks. I can’t even count the number of times I took damage despite thinking that I was safely hidden behind a pillar. Hades‘ hit detection can also be iffy at times, and enemies (especially in Asphodel) have an annoying habit of moving out of range of melee attacks or clipping into walls where you can’t reach them. And while you can dodge through obstacles or over ravines, you can only cross certain distances and I sometimes found myself frantically dashing into an invisible wall instead of dashing away from a projectile.

But nothing—absolutely nothing—is as big of a problem as the RNG. For a long time, I would prioritize rooms with Athena perks because there’s a chance she can give your dodge the ability to reflect attacks, and I’m used to being more or less invincible during dodges in games such as this. I’ve had back-to-back-to-back runs without this perk appearing, however. It got so bad that I began looking at other options, and fortunately, the shield weapon blocks projectiles pretty consistently. This problem runs deep, however, and I’d consistently fail to get the perks I needed to complement my build. For example, I’ve found an upgrade that causes normal attacks to inflict doom on enemies and another one that causes any effect with a reflect ability to instantly trigger doom. I’d have loved to combine them, but I never had a playthrough where I found both. Again, 40 hours. Not okay.

The visuals are repetitive and unreadable while Hades‘ soundtrack is just treading water

One thing that Supergiant Games is really good at is color contrasts, and I especially appreciate that in Hades. Tartarus in particular is a lovely mess of blue and green lights that contrast orange and red enemies and attacks. That fantastic contrast is lost in later areas, though, and I found myself looking at the same art for so many hours that I found it noteworthy whenever a single minor thing changed despite those changes truly being the smallest of victories. Another thing I noticed is a lot of fuzziness despite supposedly being 4K-ready, almost like Hades is applying a blur during quick animations to approximate motion blur. That’s nitpicking, though. The real problem with the art in this game is that the attack animations are so over-the-top that it can be impossible to tell what’s happening. With modifiers cranked up and tons of enemies on the screen, attack cues can overlap and leave you unable to tell what direction an enemy is aiming as they set up their attack, leaving you to guess which direction to dodge in.

I criticized Pyre‘s music for establishing a similar vibe to Bastion and Transistor‘s soundtracks without putting in the effort to be quite as memorable, and that’s a flaw that Hades shares, though to a much lesser extent. For the most part, the soundtrack is comprised of annoying area themes and some forgettable guitar tracks during boss fights, only aspiring for more in the rare vocal tracks. I haven’t played Transistor since its release in 2014 and I still remember the melody to In Circles, but the only tracks I remember from Hades after 40 hours of playing are a couple of area themes that I don’t particularly care for. The main problem is that the music isn’t designed to connect meaningfully to the story. The epilogue (obvious spoiler warning) barely has any music at all, and it’s quickly pushed aside shortly after it starts playing. On some level, I get it—the amount of money that went into Hades‘ large amount of voice acting had to come from somewhere. But honestly, I expected more creativity on this front. It’s just average.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10 – This would be a 7 if it ended 20 hours earlier when it should have
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Game Pass key was provided and used for this Hades review. Reaching the credits took around 15-20 hours. The epilogue took 20 additional miserable hours for very little payoff. I need a vacation.

Hades review – Where did Supergiant Games go? first appeared on Killa Penguin