Among the not-so-many good action-rpgs, Hades is one of the best games to come in the last decade.
In your escape from the underworld, you fight monsters spanning the good old Tartarus of Greek mythology. Each run creates its skill build and you get some permanent perks and modifications to spice things up for the long haul.
While it is a roguelike, it is worth looking at in regard to beloved hack-and-slash games such as Crown King Diablo 2. Or the newer kid on the block – Path of Exile.
Hades breaks up the core a bit and goes for fast action instead of too much complexity. Though compared to most games it’s pretty darn complex, boasting large numbers of synergies and crazy skills. To describe the effect briefly; with a few clicks, you can go through the screen, swoop past a monster, backstab it for some extra damage, or push it into a spiked trap. If that wasn’t enough, in the middle of those you can sneak a hit reflecting a projectile to the hater who shot at you, then throw them a bonus devastating spell of your own. Few games can fit all that into a single second. Fewer still can make it not only functional but a joy to actually play with.
That’s where Hades shines, moment-to-moment combat. While there is a great variety, things are simplified to 5 moves. Normal attack, special attack, spell, dash, ultimate. All of these can be changed with a slew of behavior modifications. Extra range, speed, knockback, debuffs, damage, dot effects, and all sorts of things that affect the flow of encounters and complement each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch? V=md8x5xlhrho
Before you think this is all for those twitchy players and not for you. Let me just say – if you don’t want to brawl by shoving your iron fists into enemy skulls – the game is so rad, that you can chillax and just carpet-bomb the living fuck out of everyone with your grenade-throwing machine gun — ala Scarface. Powered up by blessings from the rest of the Olympian gods. Playing as Scarface is not good enough? Well, how about if Zeus gave it chain-lighting, triggered on each bullet hit? Still not good enough!? Call Zeus to complain, and he’ll throw thunderbolts on half the screen, fucking everyone up. Throw grenades on top of it, why the fuck not!?
While the permanence of building long-term characters is gone, you get the benefit of random generation and getting into situations with a different arsenal. Maybe you aren’t a quite direct hack-and-slash kind of warrior. Or your parents got shot in an alley and you would never use a gun. Well, get the decent damage turret skill. Place a few turrets down to start crippling enemies and impale some bitches with your bow-homing arrows, and other shenanigans. Or just let the turrets deal with the grunts and shove the big bad into a lava pit.
When you begin playing it looks a bit rather simplistic, however, the level of fine-tuning it has received makes it the highlight of the game. Almost always you have opportunities for excellent maneuvering, where you can really dominate the field. You know what to expect from everyone. In such games, it’s important you don’t get fucked unfairly. And that never happens, the attack sets of all enemies are quite well-visually marked, and predictable enough.
Excellent command skills on your part can make perfect use of the always-available ability of dash. Not only can you avoid an arrow, last hit a monster, and knockback its friend into spikes. Dash also has a very short split-second evasion, so if you are a high-skill player you can remain in the kill zone of a very heavy damage hit and still dodge it. So those pesky bosses that are killing you – instead of running out of their AOE attack, you dodge and keep smashing their face.
Pull all sorts of daring stuns in the span of a single explosion flying overhead toward you. There aren’t many things that are as satisfying in gaming as a flawless victory in a chaotic brutal fight or dodging that final attack that would have killed you and landing your deadly strike in return.
The variety of skill effects you pick up steadily through each run. Unfortunately, that leaves less for items. The thrill of fun random drops is lost for you looter fans. You don’t really get to keep the random skills beyond the run. There are items but a limited amount and of limited power, and they are acquired through different means than drop. Other than that you have an arsenal of 6 weapons from the bow, sword, combat shield, spear, blade fists, and even a gun with a grenade launcher, each producing a variety of combat dynamics. Not to mention those have permanent upgrades that still change their behavior.
It is quite nice that Hades makes its own space with fans of combat, and manages to outgrow the typical large stash item collections that usually go with action RPGs.
There is a great and persistent story that is built with butloads of voice-acting, milestone incentives, and interconnected events. The NPCs react to most things you can do in the game. It has many hours of excellent voice-acting and methodically unlockable events for you to uncover. Some 20’000 or so recorded lines. The mix between combat and narrative is very well done. Your playthroughs are connected through the story as you are immortal and being killed just sends you back home to Tartarus where you started. If an explosion killed you, there is a little quip-voiced dialogue given to you by the NPCs about explosions.
The persistence of all that you do really ties everything together in a tangible way that makes more sense of your quest and definitely compensates for a large item collection and permanent characters.
Heck, you can even buy some furniture and cool shit for your staging area.
Developers Supergiant Games have learned that they can use all the tools in their previous great titles to produce a game that can entertain people for far longer than 5 hours. That was the main issue before, complex and entertaining systems that just ended as you reached peak performance.
The soundtrack to it is maybe a bit less amazing than previous entries. Mostly because the older ones had epic scores with godly vocals. Hades although having good music just has a hard time reaching the high bar of previous glory. The sound effects I had to double-check. There is usually a lot going on and I don’t notice them so much. They are good enough it seems. More utility than sound bliss, but that’s much needed in a robust game.
While talking about hack and slash, there always has to be some mention of visual clusterfucks. Although Hades has some, generally you can read what’s happening on screen. Only in a few cases, you can lose track of it all, which is better than most games that rely on flashy visuals.
High-action fans can appreciate numerous affordances made to allow you to play more laid-back runs and toy around with things. Even explosive barrels make a regular appearance to give you extra variety. So maybe you can one-shot everything with your op special ability upgrades. But, every now and then you just want to knock back a cluster of swordsmen into an explosion and let them be finished by another hazard.
Even if a randomly generated run is not going so well, you can usually modify it in a way that gives you some abilities that salvage the situation. So, maybe you wanted Ares to give you that nice doom buff and he isn’t showing up. Grab an item that makes sure you meet him in the next quarter of the game.
Hades is a pool of good ideas that have been elevated to a superb performance by extensive testing and adjustment. It was unfortunate that it started as an early access epic games exclusive, however, it seems a maximum value has been gained from it. It is generally the opposite of Bethesda games – Hades started good and ended up magnificent with the extra work.
