Hades Is Rather Special (Review) Part 2

 To the beat of my own drum, as if I was always in control of my experience and how far I could get, there were unlocks that could only become available over time, but they felt like additional opportunities to deal damage or to survive, they felt like options to expand my arsenal and give me more choices in Hades. Their unlocks, like the talents, and the renovations all feel like the required keys needed to open the stage gates in your adventure, Risk of Rain 2 presents itself as a more classically inspired roguelike, with almost everything out of the box, making Hades feel more like a contemporary rogue light where anything becomes possible after you put in the hours I've already briefly hinted at the brilliance of Hades combat, but I want to come back to that to make sure it gets it's due in this video it really is absolutely superb the starting point is the weapon design which never falters with all six weapons available, every swing or shot is snappy and fulfills every move it's a mix of fun and functionality. No two weapons can be played remotely the same, as their uniqueness from the way you defend or dig into each weapon consumes everything requires you to understand and master as well the Mechanical Mastery that not often requested in roguelikes, which usually rely on simpler weapon designs complemented with interesting stat buffs and consumables. It's a bit overwhelming that each weapon has four basic forms that radically alter its performance and can be further enhanced through Thedaedalus upgrades, changing them yet again where many other roguelikes are asking what we can add to make them more powerful. Hades asks how we can expand

what you already have to make it both more powerful and more interesting, for the most part Haiti's enemy design is excellent, although it's not without its issues. In general, each enemy design has a specific set of attacks that are clearly telegraphed and deal the right amount of damage and can easily be counted if your game knowledge is up to scratch, although especially the warriors in Elysium can be frustrating. They usually have super armor, so they can't be interrupted or relocated. They have huge long-range attacks that you can often hit off-screen. Some of them carry shields that negate any frontal damage, and you have to kill each of them twice or they'll respawn. Those chariots also have too much goddamn health. Obviously the intent was to increase the difficulty, and what is the penultimate zone, but these enemies feel oppressive in a way that other enemies don't even have the bosses. The biggest problem with hades for me and that's why I don't quite get it she is as dear to me as everyone else

is the

how much visual noise is going on and how super giants not only do nothing to alleviate this problem but actively engage in it in the later levels It's difficult to tell one from the other. Everything in Hades produces these lush particle effects that fly across the screen or just sit there when they spawn. It's possible for your Dash to emit a blue puff of icy frost. Your starting point for the dash is a pulsing purple cloud of hangover your occupation by a slow spinning blade your special jump chain lightning between your enemies and your basic attacks that create big splashes when hitting their enemies all this is on top of the ground and catches the poison and the magma and the bombs and the arrows in and the spears that enemies are constantly throwing at you, not to mention that the actual enemies themselves have a ton of stuff on screen at once isn't just Hades Sin ce die Most games like this get pretty messy, but Hades only feels more noisy and I've regularly found it difficult to work through the chaos to be clear, this isn't an issue I have in other games. Bullet Hells is actually a genre I've usually found pretty For some reason I've even recently played 60 Hours of Rain Risk 2, a game that can get completely wild with the madness on screen, and I've never once found that I was thinking well I just can't understand this, I was thinking that all this time with Hades as I struggled to see everything that was going on so I could react to it, there are some things Supergiant could have done to help with this to alleviate last fantasy. 14 has a spell effects toggle that lets you disable a whole bunch of them or dismiss them, that would have been a godsend in hell, no pun intended, even more basic things would have gone a long way. My biggest gripe in this category of complaints is that hitting enemies causes them to flash white. Note that you've dealt damage, but enemies will also flash white when they're trying to attack you. So you can't rely on the white flash meter in fights like this, as you keep the boss flashing white constantly by attacking him, so Temple of Stick seems to double all of this where others do

The areas are generally spacious. The temple isn't so much a temple as more of a rabbit hole-like dungeon. Narrow claustrophobia even with so little wiggle room in the beginning and even less after the rats are done pouring poison all over the place or the clay pots hurling their bombs at you and tiny rats so small and camouflaged in the background are that you're often just running around like crazy spamming your AoE skills to avoid them, for a game that's already struggling with the visual clarity of many of the design choices underpinning this final section are a little confusing, even with all of these flaws, I'm a little on or off Hades because Hades feels so refined in how each part of it is deeper than any roguelike I've played before, even though it has less stuff, fewer enemies, fewer weapons, fewer Areas, fewer bosses, but there's that mechanical depth in each of those things that's so hard to produce and so rare to find in games, I mean, risk coming back from R men Ain 2 is a game I personally prefer to Hades. I think the biggest shortcoming of this game was that it relied heavily on stats and passive damage to alter your playthrough from applying AoE damage or bleeding or letting me use my items more often, but the mechanical process of controlling my character and using his abilities remains largely the same from run to run and every boon, they all offer the stat upgrades you'd expect, but they also ask me to charge for projectiles differently in a playthrough to deflect them when they're in dashing at enemies next playthrough to zap them with lightning in many of my playthroughs various roguelikes have felt similar

similar to each other, although the items I picked up were very different in Hades. No two runs ever feel the same. I mean, I could make them feel the same if I wanted to, but I'm so motivated to try new weapons and combinations of blessings that it just feels like a waste not to come back to what I started with of this video, about the roguelike design that's becoming more ubiquitous, about what it will mean to play Diablo 4 when it releases, and I envision a process of leveling a character and their weapons and gear sets having to grind out for dozens of hours to finally get to something I'm happy with in all the time I have I've basically done the same thing over 50 hours of farming on my barbarian to get to a build , only to switch to a different class and do it all over again these arpgs are moving to a seasonal model aimed at increasing your character progression with start and end booking, it's like a really, really long roguelike session that lasts 3 months instead of 30 minutes. Contained within this seasonal model is the awareness that it is progression that makes the process of developing your character most engaging. The goal of a final build is not the goal to have a build, but to build one. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking all of these things, but I'm almost certain that this year of high-quality roguelikes has started a process of rewiring my brain, especially Haiti's isometric dungeon crawling is so satisfying and so sophisticated that I think it will be difficult to go back to these more time-synced games when I can experience the ups and downs that this genre has to offer in such a refined and condensed form here in Hades, which is spurring

There it is for me to have it different. I don't know the answer to that yet but Haiti certainly makes me think about it dude it's 2020 are you telling me you're not using a VPN to encrypt to protect your data is what you're telling me you are right now out there surfing those intertubes with all your personal information and passwords. Imagine if someone got their hands on your browsing history. Don't worry though I've got you covered and more specifically rated as the best VPN solution by multiple publications because their service is safe, reliable and fast. expressvpn encrypts your personal information, making it harder for malicious hackers to get hold of your information, like your login passwords or your credit card details. You know those emails you keep tricking someone into resetting your password, expressvpn is just one of the ways you can prevent hacks like this from happening, but it's not just about security, it's about good times Ally , I use it for Netflix where I can't get access to the latest episodes of Rick and Morty here in Australia. Expressvpn lets me bypass that so I can see what the heck I'm asking, it's also about games you can access early games that launch earlier around the world. So if Cyberpunk unlocks in New Zealand but you have to wait another 17 hours in your country, you don't have to wait anymore. Just change your location with expressvpn and you can find out how you can get three months free by clicking the link in the description box below or by visiting expressvpn.com. Thanks to expressvpn for sponsoring this video and thanks for watching. Thanks for watching my video, if you liked it it's a thumbs down so i know i have to do better next time. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing, and if you really enjoyed it, you might want to hit the notification bell so you don't miss a video. You can see my patrons here on the left they are awesome they are awesome if you want to join them check out my patreon page. Thanks again. We'll see you next time