Recent reviews by Autogyro

I played the original Hades a lot a lot... more than 500 hours, and I'll admit that when I first started the early access for Hades II, while I really enjoyed the new art, music, movement, enemies, mechanics and weapons, I really didn't like Melinoë. She was stuck up, prim, and she really hated on herself every time she failed, very much the opposite of Zagreus, whom I loved for his attitude.

I'm not sure Hades II's story line is going to be able to live up to the one for the first Hades, as much as she has been able to change as things have progressed, there have been some real moments when I really dislike her very female stereotypical tendency to rule follow when she really shouldn't be. I loved Zag for his ability to flout every rule in the book. She's not capable of that. There are also a lot of side characters that i just don't like, which I couldn't say about the first game.

All that said, the mechanics are wonderful, the new balancing has made it far more playable, having two directions to go makes for variety, the new gameplay possibilities in the open fields is fun, the bosses are hard, have a lot of health, but are usually quite fair, and the builds and build possibilities are immense. If you just play it for the game itself, you won't be disappointed.

I liked the God Mode for the early access, and am just taking my sweet time through it on regular mode now that it's actually released, and it feels good to know that learning attack patterns via God Mode really does help with the regular mode as well. And having gotten much further along, I'm also really disappointed with every interaction I've had once I was done with the upperworld final boss. The folks up in Olympus are just pompous, stuck up, and can't do a single thing for the progression of the story or the play. I'm just not as incentivized to get to the true ending, as I don't see the story working out as beautifully as the first. We'll see how it goes.

I enjoyed it, and hope you do have fun killing Time.

Lovely. Great music and interesting mechanics, and I totally did my best to miss the emotional backstory the first time through. I'm kind of goal oriented, I guess.

I particularly loved rebuilding everything, fixing things, and making all the flowers grow. Loved that there was nothing to fight. Loved the grace of the movement mechanics and how each was expressed by the protagonist. For a small, three plus hourish game to just play through, it was dense with fun puzzles and a good building of abilities. The world was complex enough.

The achievements are interesting. A few I'd had an impulse to do on the play through, but didn't want to take the extra effort or time to do some of those things. But there weren't so many that it was a chore when I decided to do the achievements. And the stages made emotional sense. The Anger one was great. A few "memories" needed backtracking, but not ridiculous numbers.

I liked the Memory from getting all the momentos a lot.

Super Nostalgic, especially for all of us who grew up with Wii Tanks. The music design is much like the original, with instruments and tunes that go with each of the different enemy types! Love that so much, and there are so many more levels, a few more types of enemies and a whole slew of extras that are a lot of fun. The bosses are a lot of fun. There's a lot of just funky and fun individual things you can do on your own as well as the whole team/multiplayer aspect. Getting up to sixteen people into a lobby is insane, but so much fun for just blitzing through levels.

It's odd how a PvE game developer hasn't learned that nerfing all the weapons so that they're all useless or not fun to play is not the way to go. EVERYTHING that people learned how to use against the enemies got nerfed, every strategy that people figured out how to work was hamstrung by the developers. I don't understand the direction they're taking, but it's clearly not the way their community was asking.

The minions on each level are very simple and don't telegraph the bosses particularly well, and you have to get through multiple levels to get back to the boss, so it's tedious (not difficult in any way that teaches me more) to learn boss movements. The problem really is that some of the bosses just teleport to you, in ways that are really hard to figure out. The lollipop girl and the Big Boy look alike are really horrible to figure out.

I love the music, the art, some of the humor, but there isn't that much of a real storyline?

I find the dynamics of this more interesting than Overcooked, in that the whole timing of getting orders, then making them, then serving them, and the clean up having to happen so that more customers come in is really interesting. And having it be a rogue light, i.e. you have to start over every time you fail makes it intriguing in that you have to just let go of it, and you can change the layout of the restaurant from what you learned last time. The coming and going of recipes makes for more variety and you get to choose what to inflict on yourself for each run. Definitely more fun with friends rather than alone, but some of the upgrades from simply having played still come with time spent.

The graphics aren't as interesting/funny as Overcooked, but then they don't really get as much in the way of doing what you need to do. Sometimes the working area and icons of the things you're cooking with are too small compared to the overall working space? So it gets a little frustrating sometimes to see how deeply cooked a steak is, but it's sometimes like Unrailed! where you accidentally target what you didn't want to target.

All in all a fun game, though.

I come from competitive TF2, from War Thunder, from OW, from freaking Rainbow Six Siege where the mire of toxicity and cheaters and bots and paid battle passes and the thousand and two ways game companies try to milk you for cash are just a part of EVERYDAY EXISTENCE. First person shooters where everyone talks trash, f***s over their teammates, baits them, leaves them to die, head shots them for speaking, or just ignores that they even exist. Where the formats of the games support, encourage, and even reward the "I'm better than all you losers" attitude in every direction.

I hadn't realized how much energy was getting sucked from me at every turn until I started this game.

Ghost Ship said that they start at the very basis of the game by making it cooperative. And with the way the mechanics of this game works, the vast majority of this community is supportive, helpful, and will go out of their way to make things work well for you. The simple mechanic of everyone shares in everything that's gained during the game is genius. Cheaters can't take anything from anyone else. The whole host system make it impossible for bots to ruin people's day. If someone's trying to ruin a game you're hosting, you can kick them. It's amazing.

And the weapons and dwarves have vast variety in abilities, adaptability to your game play and style, and everyone can tackle it as hard or as casually as they desire. And I think this game actually does a good job of meeting TF2 levels of Funny. I have friends who do Haz 5 as the Only Way To Go and others who prefer to just play at Haz 3 and talk, enjoy themselves, and make more gradual progress while enjoying the heck out of the loadouts they have. None of those ways are "wrong". The possible ways to progress in abilities are the Perk System, Weapons, Weapon Upgrades, Overclocks, and just playing the game to figure out how it all works.

And the game itself gives me these amazing interludes to just be with the people I choose to play with. We can explore these vast, beautiful, new caverns with each other and marvel at what we find, have beers together and kick a few barrels at the base, or do stupid Funny things with mobility boosts for the sheer joy of it and have our friends bring us back when we fall.

The battle pass system is FREE. There is NO paid track. You can't just Go Fast By Flinging Money at the company. It's also mostly cosmetic, but also gives you rewards of minerals that help you progress on equipment. And after the season, those cosmetics are available in other ways. There's no missing out on a Hat that has come and gone.

You can pay Ghost Ship more money by buying their DLC cosmetic packs. I flung as much as I could and then bought more games for more people and got a full XBox setup to play with a friend there as well. Anything that will persuade Ghost Ship to DO MOAR is a priority in my book.

The game play is generational, varied, and the numerous and entirely gorgeous biomes all have their own characteristics and barriers. The missions are all different and when mixed and matched with the biomes create a vast array of adventures that never really feel like they repeat. I can pick how many enemies I want to come up against and how hard they are to defeat and we get rewarded in proportion to that. There's a lot to learn. I love the music, too, and how it heralds swarms and intense combat situations.

All that AND hats. Coming from TF2, I value Hats and cosmetics and being able to personalize MY characters. *laughs* It's a good thing, and there are so many ways to customize the way your funny little men look as well as how they play and what they can do.

So, yeah, I encourage you to get it, and if you're one of my friends, ping me and we'll play.

It's kind of the next step after Terraria, Stardew Valley, and Minecraft. There are elements of all of these, and homages to many of them; but I really am enjoying the progression much more than all of them. It's smoother, and the ability to keep your hot bar when you die is amazing.

There are progression elements of two kinds. The first is the Terraria/Minecraft progression in the items you can craft and obtain from bosses or mobs. The second is the addition of character progression, much as in Stardew, the things you do more often, you get better at doing. Having both is a real win, and I love that just playing will get one more powerful.

The pre-defined characters really do get a good boost with their beginning stats, and use the progression mechanics to differentiate early players. But the more experience you get doing the things you like doing, the more you're rewarded on that path.

The world, though, is amazing, and I've really been enjoying it a lot. It's almost like what would happen if all of Terraria were underground? The various biomes are fascinating, and the gating of ability to each area is pretty solid, but if you are Just That Good, you can just skip into whatever biome you want, and just use skill in place of the extra damage weapons from the other areas will get you.

The bosses are pretty fair on the most part, and with some of the pre-release updates, the tool system has gotten more balanced and the sheer variety of tools, weapons, and armor is really nice. You can play the way you want to and get the kind of equipment that best suits your style of play and still have a pretty clear upgrade path on all of them.

I'll admit that when Hades first came out, I avoided it. I stayed clear of it other than to watch a friend play it, thinking, all the while, that I didn't have the reflexes or the hands, honestly, to do that much grinding; but the seed was planted then, because while my friend enjoyed the fights what he really loved was the unwinding of the story. So I picked it up more than a year after its release, when it was on sale during the Winter Break. The Hugo didn't hurt my decision.

And I was right. I'm not that fast, and not particularly good; but what kept me coming back was Zagreus not caring in the LEAST that we'd died. He always had the shock of upset at the instant of the death (much like mine), but the very next line he'd say, stepping out of the pool, was "Here we go again." It's really his character that hooked me, and his attitude of impatience at even the idea of stopping or giving up.

The game ramps up really well with effort and a lot of time just spent on it. I hesitated about putting God Mode on, until I ran into Theseus. He was so infuriating that I finally put on God Mode just to beat HIM, never mind Hades. The interesting thing is that God Mode feels a little better, but not insane (especially for the achievement of getting more than 30% on the Pierced Butterfly, you just have to learn how the enemies attack and move as well as understand the timing of the traps well enough to just never get hit, God Mode only lessens the damage you take when you get hit, but if you never get hit...), and while it's "easier" it's the same grind, and you have to still work at it to get the Darkness needed to get better enough and lucky enough to get the builds you need to get past Hades.

But I realized that the grind itself is what reveals the story and all the relationships that Zagreus rebuilds and heals simply by being himself. Which, I guess, goes back around to my original point, which was that it's his character that really made it worthwhile for me to do. And now that I've gotten all the achievements, and put a good 150 hours into it, I can honestly say I enjoyed nearly all of them. And I thoroughly enjoyed Zagreus' snarky comments, the surprising little things he and his opponents or allies say at the craziest of times, I enjoyed the art and the music quite a lot, especially the energy of the music during many of the fights, and I'll never forget the moment when Orpheus finally sang again, ever.

It's an experience. And my main advice is that this game is for those that find that they enjoy the process of a game, it's a good one, but it is a real grind to get through everything. And while familiarity can breed contempt of the "same" battles over and over again, it can also engender ease with those fights, much like Hollow Knight. The different weapons and all their aspects let everyone play the way they're most comfortable playing, and the responsiveness of the controls is sweet. I've started a second save without the use of God Mode and I'm able to get waaaay further so much faster simply through my experience now with the fights; but the need for the gifts of the Mirror, the keepsakes, and the Contractor are necessary to get through it all.

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Okay, Nearly 100 hours later I finished the No God Mode run through to the epilogue and beyond a bit, trying to get all the plushies. So experience does make it mildly faster. I did the initial review at 165.