Hades

[h1]HADES[/h1] [h2]TLDR Rating: 9/10[/h2] [h2]INTRO[/h2] Hades is a dungeon crawler roughlike, where you play as Zagreus the son of Hades, trying to break out of hell, [spoiler]after finding out that your mother (the real one) is outside of hell[/spoiler]. In this process you are helped by The Olypmian gods, namely Zues, Posidon, Ares, Athena, Artemis, Dionisis, Demeter, Hermes, Aphrodite.[spoiler]There is also Chaos but lets leave that up to the players to discover[/spoiler] Throughout the game you meet and intract with the various cast of the game including, Nyx, Dusa, Megera Thanantos, to name a few. Some becomes your allies in your quest while others offer quests or chats. [h2]The Good[/h2] [h1]Characters[/h1] Easily the Strongest suit of Hades is it's characters; So lets talk(or read in this case?) about them in detail. The character disigns are beautiful. Each character is distinct from each other and has their own style. From the gods to the enemies and bosses, NPCs are all amazing and beautiful. The bond system, by talking to NPCs and gifting them Items you can grow closer to them, allowing you to forge bonds with them, unlock new dialogues. Oh and how can I not talk about the dialogues, if you ask any hades fan , they would tell you how rare it is to hear the same chatter twice, this game has a ♥♥♥♥ ton of chats and all of them are voiced by an amazing cast. Allowing you to always look forward to what they plan on saying. [h1]The gameplay[/h1] As a roughlike gameplay is ofcourse a strong focus as if it lacked quality or quantity it would get boring really fast. But fear not for Hades lacks neither. With the aforementioned dialogues, Has 6 different weapon with very different playstyles and each weapon has 4 aspects, which goes furthur to change the playstyles, not only this but when doing a run, the gods give you boons which you can obtain at the start or by clearing stages, each boon has their own gimmick (such as blade rift or hangover or weak for Ares, dionisis and aphrodite respectivly) which changes how you play and approach a run, each boon grants passive abilities or active ability or one time benifits, There are also Duo Boons and Legendary boons which have requirements to getting them and thus help in making unique and broken buiilds.Also There's Daedulus's hammer (Im sorry if I butchered the name) which changes how you weapon works. Now Lets talk how rng works cuz in games espcially in roughlikes rng usually tends to matter alot. Well dear reader Im happy to inform that In this game RNG in terms of gameplay atleast is very minimal. You can beat the game without any build. When every you pick a boon or upgrade you get three choices to coose from and later can even be rerolled. You also get to sometimes choose which room clear rewards you get.By Increasing bonds with characters you will also get keepsakes which help your run and reduce rng even further. The difficulty , hades is a farly difficult game for the avarage person, but even for the hardcore, soulslike lovers they can use the pact of punishment to make the game harder for themselves, hell its nesessary to finish the complete story of the game, so in terms of challenging, the game has endless of it. [h1]Misc.[/h1] The art is beautiful. I dont think I need to explain any furthur, the characters and Environments are so well make, its just a chef's kiss The music is good too. Some tracks are great. It also runs on a potato like mine so most pcs can run it no probs. (If I missed some stuff it should prolly go here) [h2]The Bad[/h2] As good as Hades is it really does have some flaw, and by some I mean two Major ones. The first is the dialogue RNG. While the RNG during gameplay can be controlled to a degree and isnt even that detrimental, Dialogue RNG cant be controlled, sometimes you have to spend 30 to 40 mins killing your self just so you can get the dialogue you want. Next is the GRIND, raising bonds requires items which have rng involved, unlocking weapons and their aspects takes a good bit of time, unlocking upgrades is very hard, unlocking summons (gotten at max rank only from certain characters) Darkness (the main resource for upgrading) is given in scare, it feels like supergiant wants you to spend hours dying, not to mention just how infuencial these upgrades can be from some minor healing or luck boost all the way to extra ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lives. The last but minor point is that legendary and Duo boons sometimes just dont show up even when you meet the requirements which can feel very frustratin and is some cases of high diff. runs can make or break them.