After my usual morning routine this morning of answering an unrelenting amount of emails while sipping my coffee, one of my friends messaged informing me that Hades 2 was out. Available to play right now. I couldn’t believe that such a high profile game would get a stealth release without any big announcement or fanfare so I immediately booted up my Steam Deck and headed to the store.
Low and behold, there it was, live in early access. I installed the just over 4 GB game and eagerly booted it up. Dumped right into the first I was immediately impressed by how well it ran on the deck without any tinkering (it was even Deck verified). The combat feels as fluid and easy as ever and even without a tutorial I was able to quickly grasp the new abilities, almost as quickly as it took me to die for the first time. After death I was able to get a better understanding about what is happening in the story. From my brief playtime so far I can only say that you play as Melinoë, daughter of Hades who is on a mission to confront titan of time, Chronos, who has kidnapped your father. With the backing of Olympus, you must fight your way all the way out of the underworld and rescue your father.
So far, it feels like more of the same from Supergiant and that’s about as far from a bad thing as it could be. It looks like the devs have taken everything that was good about the first game and added more depth, and while the game in its current state, is full of placeholder assets and no ending, there already seems to be more content than all of its predecessor. I will have a more formal review after I have spent more time with the game, and if things continue to grow from this point, I am only excited to see where it goes from here.
Hades II is available in Early Access on Steam and Epic Games Store