Hades is at its core a slow and repetitive action rogue-lite. What I want from a rogue-lite is either an excelllent challenging experience or a lot of variety, and Hades does not provide either. Hades provides a decent gameplay loop, but Hades does not have a very high skill ceiling and every run is very similar due to a lack of variety in the gameplay. Hades provides a reasonable challenging experience and some variety, which is enough to keep most players engaged, but is not enough for players that reach the skill ceiling. The narrative experience is quite slow, and sits on top of the gameplay and will not carry the entire experience by itself.
Hades’ best aspect is its polish and especially the fluidity of movement and combat. The game’s presentation is excellent, albeit with some visual clutter occasionally. Your first experience with this game will almost always be good due to how well its core combat systems are polished and implemented. Hades might feel like a flawless experience to you if you don’t need a high skill ceiling, complexity or variance from your rogue-lite games. If you do the game is simply a competent rogue-lite with some very clear strengths and weaknesses.
One of the greatest strength, but also one of the greatest weakness of Hades is its progression system. The upgrades are broken in terms of how powerful they are. The progression system features keys to unlock weapons and talents, gems to unlock upgrades to the dungeon and darkness to increase the strength of the unlocked talents. Due to the incredible strength of these upgrades they will carry most players through the dungeon, and you will manage to beat the game eventually based on these stat upgrades alone. This is great for newer players that needs a gentle hand to guide them through the rogue-lite genre, but is very frustrating when a lot of features that are core to the gameplay loop is hidden behind a grind. Too many of the upgrades feel like they should have been part of the base experience and not unlocked through collecting things in the dungeon. I hated this progression system myself, and it reminds me of how progression systems in freemium games are done, but without the option to pay. It is bloated and way too slow, and I think the game would have been significantly better if you progressed at four times the rate you do. This system sacrifices the experience of skilled and experienced players to provide a unique experience to newer players.
As a rogue-lite Hades contains RNG that changes how the run feels, but the changes are not very big. They essentially revolves around you focusing on either the normal attack, the special attack of the weapon, your cast (which is a ranged ability on a cooldown), your call (powerful short lasting effects) and your dodge. These abilities will get new modifiers based on the different boons from the Olympian gods. While these modifiers are different, they all add damage and an additional effect to these abilities. There are very limited with odd combinations you will discover while playing the game, and every run feels quite similar in terms of how it works from a gameplay perspective. The enemies are the same, the levels are repeated, the bosses are always the same.
The combinations of talents, weapons and upgrades have a massive effect on how good your damage and survivability will be. Some boons are simply bad in combination with certain talents and weapons, and you can get unlucky in terms of which boons you get. This is especially an issue when you begin the game where you don’t have a lot of agency to deal with the RNG. This leads to the possibility of you getting incredible far into the dungeon early because you had incredible good RNG which made your weapon do a lot of damage. If you dislike going back to dealing mediocre damage afterwards when you have had a taste of that power is up to you. I thought it was very frusting experience to deal with the RNG initially.
In the late game after you have unlocked everything you get more tools to deal with the RNG and the game becomes more better at this point. The game provides an average experience in terms of progression and creativity, which is most of the other gameplay experiences, which means that the game needs to provide a challenging experience in order to keep players around. The game manages to provide one for the majority of the players, because it is reasonably good. Reasonably good is not good enough to keep me engaged in this type of game for more than 50 hours.
The game does contain a heat system which gives you the ability to add modifiers (which is mostly stat based) to your runs after you escape for the first time. This gives you the ability to tune the difficulty of the game, which is great. This does increase the challenging experience to a reasonable level, it does feel reasonably challenging to beat the game with a lot of modifiers. However, at some point these modifiers will turn into RNG, and it is limited how much these modifiers amplify the challenging experience. The fundamental challenging experience never goes beyond reasonably good, even if the game can become very difficult with the use of these modifiers.
Hades’ worst aspects is the lack of variance, the lack of a high enough skill ceiling in the context of a rogue-lite and its progression system. These aspects are something that a player that seeks excellent gameplay cares about, but
Overall the game is excellent for most players because they do not reach the skill ceiling of the game. It is slow for most people, but if you can deal with a slow game Hades has a lot to offer. If you like me reach the skill ceiling and manages to see behind the gears of the game it still provides a reasonable experience to pass some time, but it is nothing more than that either. I can have fun for a couple of runs after a weeks break, but then the game gets stale again.
The design of Hades can be found here.
| Playtime | 40 Hours to complete the main quest + 10 hours to unlock every keepsake and weapon variety (hundreds of hours possible if you enjoy the gameplay). |
| Game release date | 17 September 2020 |
| Review release date | 15 September 2024 |
| Light sensitivity | Minor issues, some flashing lights (not extremely bright) |
| Sound sensitivity | No issues |
| Motion sickness | No issues |
| Steam | Metacritic – Metascore (93) |