Warning: These games may contain intense violence, blood and gore, and/or strong language.

Very recently, Supergiant Games released a trailer announcing that they would be starting early access for Hades II. For those of you who have no idea of what the original game was, it is a roguelike action game set in the greek underworld, and it revolves around the protagonist and son of Hades, Zagreus, trying to leave his father’s realm. The game is an endless loop of setting out through the beautifully drawn regions of the underworld. The gameplay is fast paced and has an amazing natural learning curve due to the endless structure of the game.

Hades II is much the same except there is much more content, even in early access. For those of you who played the first game, you might recognize some of the characters, but it is mostly new characters that are all beautifully voiced and drawn. All of the returning characters have new designs as well. For example, everyone’s favorite skeleton training dummy, Skelly, is now Commander Schelemeus, the Training Master of the Crossroads. The Crossroads is the new home base where you start your runs into the underworld (and above to the mortal world once you unlock it), and is home to many vibrant gods, ancient heroes, and shades (ghosts).

Probably the most important character of this game however is the new protagonist, the daughter of Hades, Melinoë (Me-lee-no-ee). She is quite different from Zagreus in a lot of ways, but most noticeably in combat.

The combat of Hades II is satisfyingly smooth, and quite challenging. A couple of things make it a bit more difficult than the original game. First, Melinoë is only given one dash, while in the first game you could get multiple in a row. In return Melinoë has a sprint instead, which lets you move incredibly fast, but you don’t have much of a guarantee to avoid damage. Secondly, Melinoë does not acquire more base health as quickly and easily as the Zagreus did. But where Melinoë and Zagreus really diverge is their selections of weapons and how they use and improve them. In Hades II you use magic to supercharge your attacks, but at the same time use mana which means you can only use so many overcharges per encounter. In the first game you had the Infernal Arms, six powerful and dangerous weapons that the gods used to overthrow the titans. In Hades II you have the Nocturnal Arms, six very powerful… yeah its a bit of a repeat but the new weapons are much different. You start with the argent staff, a pretty standard damage dealing weapon which when you use its overcharge a long line of damage is sent out, heavily bringing down the health of the creatures hit by it. The second weapon is the Sister Blades, two daggers that allow you to attack very quickly, at the cost of damage. Its overcharge has you teleport behind a targeted enemy and deal massive damage. The other five weapons currently in the game are ones that I believe are more entertaining to find out how to use and what they do on your own. 

The main focus of the game is fighting your way to the House of Hades, technically now the House of Time, and defeating the titan Chronos who has imprisoned your father and made war on the other Olympian gods. Each region of the underworld has its own unique enemies and a tough boss fight before you can progress to the next region. Each region also has its own resources to collect to progress through the story, so for the majority of the game you won’t be focused on going all the way down (or up), but instead getting to a specific region to collect the unique resource located there.

Something that I believe Hades and its sequel excel at is the music which was made by the wonderful Darren Korb. The soundtrack of Hades I and II mix both rock music, original greek instruments, and wonderful singing. My current favorite song is Coral Crown, which is played in a boss fight against rock and roll sirens (like the ones from Greek myth). The amount of skill that Korb uses to mix Greek and modern instruments perfectly is insane. 

Hades II is currently set to stay in early access during 2024, which while it seems like a long period of time, gives me a sense of relief that they aren’t rushing to release the game. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, for the past few years developers have been rushing production on games that are highly anticipated, causing these games to release unfinished. The largest example of this was Cyberpunk 2077, which was released incredibly ahead of schedule due to pressure from fans who had been waiting for the game for quite some time. This ended up leading to one of the buggiest games due to the scope of the game.

Supergiant Games have definitely made a great choice by taking their time to refine and perfect the game with player feedback before they release the full game, which is slated for 2025.