Análises recentes de MentallySauced

I wish there was a way to describe my recommendation beyond yes or no because the game was great for me for the longest time. Initial verdict is great gameplay but wait for it to be on sale because it has some other big issues for single player story fanatics.

• Fun gameplay with the vocations, I didn't play sorcerer, mystic, rouge, and magic archer at time of review.
  
• Looks great with some really cool animations (sorry everyone who is struggling to run this) I have an i5-13600KF & Radeon RX 6900XT.

• Story did not resolve in a good way in my opinion which I will expand upon below.
  
• Some performance issues still noted for me at time of review
  
• I never had the pawn sickness issue crop up in my gameplay but considering it, as Skaterskunk says in his review This sick pawn will murder the entire town you rest in. Quest givers, friends, vendors. Doesn't matter. Oh, and it's a cutscene. Even though there are some ways around this the fact that this can just happen if you are late in the game and not paying attention is crazy and going to ruin some people.

• I think the micro-transactions are so inconsequential in this case because everything is easily found in abundance in the game, if you are struggling with camping gear I don't even know how you are playing to have this issue.

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I think I would honestly divide this game into 2 sections for me. Running around and leveling most of the vocations part 1 and part 2 is the last like 2 hours of gameplay where I accidentally finished the campaign and felt so let down. In part 1 I spent a bit over 40 hours that left me wanting more running around having a good time with the combat system for several Vocations. Learning the quirks of each and getting better at defeating enemies through learning a Vocation or just knowing more about the enemy was great. I know it is not advised to jump around because of how the leveling changes what substats you get each level depending on what Vocation you are but I wanted to try and get all of them maxed for myself just because. Also, don't bother worrying about your characters voice because there is no voiced dialogue for them, maybe just some grunts if you are lucky. Now lets get into the story issues.
This is mostly from my memory but lets get into it, start of the game story spoilers are here but that's it. You start out in a prison camp with memory problems not knowing you are the Arisen, not fantastic. Then you get rolled up on by Medusa and after a brief fight you escape, there's a ghost guy who helps out and I'm not sure what that's about. Then you make it to a settlement with a bunch of pawns and are really like "oh word, I'm the Arisen" so you start making your way to the city that is ruled by the Arisen but apparently there is a false Arisen ruling it currently. Now lets move into the other spoiler stuff.
Note: I know I didn't get all the side quests and probably missed some context but everyone gets a different playthough eh?
So lets be generous and say there are like 2 main story beats with essentially side quests under them. In the Arisen city you do like 4 quests to try and get evidence to throw out the false ruler. I couldn't do 1 of them because I couldn't get the masquerade to start and didn't bother looking it up but that didn't end up mattering because I went to confront the false ruler (I think you can do this after like 1 or 2 of the evidence quests) and never made it in the front door because he has spooky crystal that hurt/control my pawns. So we head out to the country that the crystal was made in to learn its secrets. For WHATEVER reason this leads right into a quest line where you are helping to MAKE another crystal that can hurt/control pawns. After doing like 1 actual quest where you go somewhere and meet the ghostly founder of the Arisen ruled land and get a broken sword from him that you can't use but its like the pawn control crystal apparently you then you have to kill a few drakes for the heart crystals to make the sword have the crystals power? Once the sword is whole it jumps essentially right into the final mission out with little indication of you starting the final mission, or at least it felt like it for me. You start following the guy who put together the crystal fake ruler has and your sword you cant use and you get to use the sword you just killed a bunch of Drakes for to... Open a door... and keep following them. As you follow them you do a very mellow dramatic "fight" with the Collosus where it is just walking along a path and you have to either climb it and attack a couple weak point or just run in front of it and shoot ballistas at it (these need a pawn at least to be able to turn more than a couple degrees and sometimes they don't want to help, also they get destroyed very quickly even by your own pawns shooting or attacking through it trying to hit the Collosus). There is no health bar so the only indication you have of doing damage or anything is how many weak points it has left. After defeating it you walk into a complex and see the guy you are following go into another area but the bridge collapses so you walk to an elevator that you start with the worthless sword you got then have a 1v1 fight with an NPC that you interact with a couple times but probably won't care about in the slightest. This is on a bridge so you can just stagger him and throw him off the edge, I completed this 1v1 in maybe 10 seconds. Then you see the false ruler is also there with crystal guy with some pawns and other people. Crystal guy is trying to summon the dragon and wants to control the dragon to stop the cycle and remake the world but this was quite literally the first time I had heard about this from this guy, I might have missed it but it felt so random. He summons a messed up drake that has boils on it and starts spouting generic bad guy lines then the real dragon drops in and deletes the drake. Crystal guy fell over and says some bad line before dying and the false ruler who I was fighting before this cutscene (I didn't even finish that fight there were a lot of enemies still up) is nowhere to be seen and the dragon starts talking to me. Bro pulls out some NPC that I maxed friendship with by doing like 2 quests for out of NOWHERE and says either fight me or walk away and I kill this guy. I didn't want to delete the NPC so I was like alright guess I'm finishing this game right now so I start the fight with the dragon. This fight was honestly too easy for me probably for a couple reasons. Before this little quest line I started on leveling the Mage Vocation and just got it to the complete support build I wanted at maybe level 6/10, no attacks in the bank but character level 52 maybe and some good gear. I was running archer and double warrior pawns. The whole fight I stood right under the dragon and popped heals and shields for maybe like 5 min before the fight was over. It felt easier than the fights with Drakes in open world because their spells are so much stronger. After that the game is over and rolls cutscene of you returning to be the ruler of Arisen-land.
After you roll credits you return to title with options to NewGame+ essentially or load last save/last inn save. I was in shock the game was over so I clicked NewGame+ and it threw up so many warnings about how it was going to overwrite my save I backed out and tried load last save which put me right BACK INTO THE ROLL CREDITS CUTSCENE. I don't remember the last time I used an Inn so I wasn't going to do that and this lead to me making this review.
I put recommend because the gameplay is fun enough that I think grabbing on sale will be good enough for everyone.

Basically crack distilled into a gameplay format, no game should make time pass as fast as this does. Steam deck or at the desktop this game will likely make an hour go by faster than you could ever expect. Gameplay is simple but getting a build going gets dopamine flowing like no other.

Stunning art direction and interesting characters are a part of Hades that I wasn't expecting to grab me like it did. I truly love the art and interactions within this game and the fun gameplay is fantastic while still feeling like a bonus to me. With many rougelike games you can see your progression not only in your upgrades but with how far you are making it on your runs as you learn the enemies or mechanics. Not only does Hades have this but it has a narrative woven into it to give a sense of satisfaction and drive to play I haven't experienced in other rougelikes.

A great game that I think will never leave a bad taste in your mouth for owning.

A fun game with lots of choices that matter, gameplay that lets you approach encounters as you would like, and character building that is up there with the best. Some downsides to be sure would be some of the bugs you can encounter later in the game and if the gameplay style doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you. But no matter what don't let the amount of choices feel like a barrier to entry, working through some of your missteps and fails is what can make a campaign feel truly unique and like your own.

There is a good chance if you like deep RPG games that this will sit right at home in your library as a highly played game and if you just want to try a good RPG with lots of depth, this is a hard one to miss.

Many people ask me, why not play skyrim. Well let me tell you, why play that lame game that progresses at the pace of a snail and where the reason people keep playing it is mods and creating your own story. Why do that when you can play this bomb ass game that has its own great story and universe with engaging characters and still puts in side quests to boot. That is why this game is great, it has lots of weapons the DLC quality is very good and everything looks awesome. This game is hard to compare to skyrim anyways becuase they are vastly different in small ways that makes them feel like completely different games. So if your tired of Skyrim and wanna shake things up and/or looking for a great game to play, this is the game for you.

Gotta love how much these knives cost... but otherwise good with the ragers and squeekers.