Hands-on: Hades 2 is a Herculean follow-up to one of 2020’s best games

Hades 2 is Supergiant Games‘ first sequel.

A modern gem of a studio, the team behind Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades is known for always leaving its fans guessing when it comes to what is next.

That’s why it came as such a surprise when it was announced that Hades, Supergiant’s breakout hit from 2020, was to receive a follow-up.

The sequel – which, like the first game, will debut in Early Access – follows Melinoe. The sister of the first game’s protagonist Zagreus, she’s a Greek goddess and princess of the underworld.

This time, instead of hunting down your dad, you’re pursuing Chronos, the titan of time.

Roguelikes don’t often feel well-suited for sequels, mainly because it’s all too easy for the original games to become stale by the time you’ve finished them.

Even with the very best in the genre – like Hades, of course – there are only so many times you can use the same powers to fly through the same rooms and take down the same bosses.

So far, however, Hades 2 has managed to shake that feeling almost instantly. For a start, the game’s color palette is very different, shaking the warm reds for cold greens. Melinoe, or Mel, is also a very different character from Zagreus.

At the heart of Hades are the gods who are bestowing Mel with her powers. While favorites from the first game return, such as Poseidon, new gods also make their debut, naturally adding new powers to the game in the process.

We’ve played Hades to death, and know our preferred load-outs like the back of our hand, so it was a nice change of pace having to discern exactly what would work in the game’s opening two areas.

As in the first game, you can befriend these gods to unlock new dialogue, and the same goes for the large cast of characters that are featured at the Crossroads, this game’s staring area and a location you’re going to become very familiar with.

Hades 2 is no mechanical do-over of the first game – in fact, in many ways Hades feels like an Early Access trial for Hades 2. Doubling down on the things people loved about the first, the starting area is now much deeper, with sidequests and minigames that tie into your main runs.

There’s also a much higher emphasis on items found while out on a run being brought back to The Crossroads in order to exchange them for items, weapons, and more.

The key critique of the roguelike genre is how bad random generation can make a run feel meaningless, but of all of our runs so far, we’ve never had one that felt completely pointless, and these side activities really help that.

The first area of the game continues to change even after you’ve progressed all the way to the boss of the second area, so we’ve yet to hit the point where the first area of each run feels like a tired obligation.

That’s helped by the fact that the game is very challenging. While no enemy is too hard to take down on its own, Hades 2 is cunning in its combinations of monsters, making even the simplest room a potential stumbling block if you’re not careful.

“The most exciting thing about Hades 2 so far is its scale.”

The most exciting thing about Hades 2 so far is its scale. There is so much in the Early Access build that hints at what will come in the future, so many characters that aren’t fully explored yet, we’re already dying for another update.

There is always the argument to be made about waiting until much more of a game, or the full game is out before supporting it, but in the case of Hades 2, we don’t know how much more convincing you could need.

Supergiant Games hasn’t lost a step and this is one of the most confident Early Access releases ever. Even with just two areas and a small selection of the content that will be in the final game, it’s better than almost all of its peers.